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World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia.

It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new

Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia

For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion.

while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,”

he memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed

In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army.

The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they

Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939,

Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East,

Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917.

If Tyne Cot is the largest military cemetery for the Commonwealth, this is the smallest American military cemetery.

Abdul Hamid II intentionally provoked uprisings in Armenian areas

Local massacres of Armenians became commonplace,

In the spring of the following year, a counter-coup made up of Islamist students and military officers broke out against the Young Turks. Because the Armenians were seen as pro-revolution, they were targeted by the counter-coup, which killed between 15,000 and 30,000 Armenians in the Adana Massacre.

the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War, and as a result, lost 85% of its land in Europe. At the same time, Italy seized coastal Libya from the empire. Muslim refugees from the lost territories, many of them victims of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, flooded into Turkey proper to the discomfort of their fellow subjects. Up to 850,000 of the refugees, fresh from abuse by Balkan Christians, were sent to Armenian-dominated regions of Anatolia. Unsurprisingly, the new neighbors did not get along well.

Embattled Turks began to view the Anatolian heartland as their last refuge from a sustained Christian onslaught.  Unfortunately, an estimated 2 million Armenians called that heartland home, as well.

Enver Pasha ordered that all Armenian men in the Ottoman armed forces be reassigned from combat to labor battalions, and that their weapons be confiscated. Once they were disarmed, in many units the conscripts were executed en masse.

The Armenians quite rightly suspected a trap, and refused to send their men out to be slaughtered, so Jevdet Bey began a month-long siege of the city.  He vowed to kill every Christian in the city. 

this Russian intervention served as a pretext for further Turkish massacres against the Armenians all across the remaining Ottoman lands.

From the Turkish point of view, the Armenians were collaborating with the enemy.

Red Sunday incident

Tehcir Law, also known as the Temporary Act of Deportation, authorizing the arrest and deportation of the country's entire ethnic Armenian population.

These acts set the stage for the genocide that followed.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched out into the Syrian Desert and left there without food or water to die. Countless others were crammed onto cattle cars and sent on a one-way trip on the Baghdad Railway, again without supplies. Along the Turkish borders with Syria and Iraq, a series of 25 concentration camps housed starving survivors of the marches.

In some areas, the authorities didn't bother with deporting the Armenians. Villages of up to 5,000 people were massacred

The people would be packed into a building which was then set on fire.

thrown overboard to drown.

In 1919, Sultan Mehmet VI initiated courts-martial against high military officers for involving the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

they were accused of planning the elimination of the empire's Armenian population.

The victorious Allies demanded in the Treaty of Sevres (1920) that the Ottoman Empire hand over those responsible for the massacres. Dozens of Ottoman politicians and army officers were surrendered to the Allied Powers

The history of capitals, as well as countries, confirms the importance of courts. The rise of Berlin, Vienna, Madrid (often called Corte), St Petersburg and Istanbul cannot be understood except as court cities, apparent in the appearance of their streets and squares or, in Istanbul, mosques. A final, fatal expression of that role occurred in July 1914. Thousands, eager for war, gathered in front of palaces in London, Berlin, Munich (where, in a photograph, the young Hitler can be seen in the crowd) and St Petersburg, to wave hands, flags and hats, cheer and sing the national anthem as their monarch appeared on the palace balcony

The Louvre was a royal palace before it became an art gallery, founded by Francis I and principal residence of Louis XIV from 1652 to 1671. After the Revolution Paris again became a court city and remained one from 1804 to 1870.

The development of constitutions also owed much to courts. The rise of the House of Commons was helped by disputed royal successions – no monarchy had more of them than England – as well as the needs of royal finances. The founding document of constitutional monarchy in 19th-century Europe was the Charte constitutionelle des francais, promulgated by Louis XVIII (who was one of its authors) on June 4th, 1814. The Charte became the principal model for other constitutions in Europe, including those of Bavaria (1818), Belgium (1831), Spain (1834), Prussia (1850), Piedmont(1848) and the Ottoman Empire (1876). Britain could not have a comparable influence, since it did not have a written constitution to copy

A constitution was a royal life insurance policy: when Louis XVIII’s brother Charles X violated it in July 1830 the dynasty was deposed. Nevertheless France finally became a republic, after 1870, only after three dynasties – the Bourbons, Orléans and Bonapartes  – had been tried and found wanting

Having helped to finance the struggle against the French Empire, the Rothschilds became financiers to the Holy Alliance. They financed Louis XVIII’s return to France in 1814, Charles X’s departure in 1830, the Neapolitan Bourbons both before and after their exile in 1861 and the Austrian monarchy. As one Rothschild wrote to another, on February 8th, 1816: ‘A court is always a court and it always leads to something.

Under Edward VII public ceremonial increased in splendour, the court entertained more frequently than before and there were more royal warrant-holders

He wrote admiringly about monarchs, from Henri IV and Louis XIV to Charles XII. In the 19th century Walter Scott was an admirer of George IV, whose visit to Edinburgh he arranged; Chateaubriand was a brilliant royalist pamphleteer and memorialist; Stendhal and Mérimée were convinced Bonapartists

Court history also subverts national boundaries. The Tudors came to power with French help: Henry VII, after 14 years of exile in Brittany and France, had French as well as English troops in his victorious army at Bosworth. One aspect of Anne Boleyn’s appeal to Henry VIII was her French education and the skills she had acquired while serving at the French court. The House of Orange was both German and Dutch (and partly English), the Bourbons acquired Spanish, Neapolitan and Parmesan branches. The Habsburgs were  able to switch nationalities and capitals between Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and, in the brief reign of Philip I, London

Through the prism of courts and monarchy, Cortes could communicate with Montezuma. The Sunni-Shi’a struggle now destroying Syria and Iraq is another war of succession. It began as a dynastic dispute, between the prophet Muhammad’s Umayyad cousins and his son-in-law Ali over succession to the caliphate: from the start Islam was a state as well as a religion. In 680 the struggle culminated in the murder of Ali’s son, the Imam Hussein, in Kerbela in Iraq. Every year, on the Day of Ashura, this murder is commemorated by Shi’a in mournful flagellatory processions

Above all, courts subvert boundaries between the sexes. Because of a European consort’s role in assuring the succession and enhancing dynastic prestige, her household and apartments could rival in size and splendour those of the monarch. Sometimes she controlled her own finances. The court of France was called ‘a paradise of women’. A court was therefore the only arena where women could compete with men, on near equal terms, for power and influence. Hence the decisive impact on national and international politics of, to name only a few consorts, Anne Boleyn, Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette. Or, among rulers’ mothers: Catherine de’ Medici and Anne of Austria in France; 17th-century Valide Sultans in the Ottoman Empire; and the Empress Dowager in China

establishment of an equality of trade conditions

national armaments will be reduced

adjustment of all colonial claims

the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight

The evacuation of all Russian territory

7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored

restore confidence among the nations

All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored

the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all

A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy

occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea

The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development

An independent Polish state should be erected

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity

On Oct. 3–4, 1918, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the German imperial chancellor, sent a note, via Switzerland, to President Wilson, requesting an immediate armistice and the opening of peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points

Germans would later argue a “betrayal” when faced by the harsher terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles

just as nations have insisted on building their own drones, their own stealth fighters and their own cyberweapons, they do not want to be beholden to a foreign power for access to the drugs that are needed in a crisis.

they do not say how, or more important, when. And many analysts recall what happened during the swine flu epidemic in 2009, when a company in Australia that was among the first to develop a single-dose vaccine was required to satisfy demand in Australia before fulfilling export orders to the United States and elsewhere.

“I would encourage everyone not to get into this trap of saying we have to get everything into our countries now and close the borders,” said Severin Schwan, the chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche. “It would be completely wrong to fall into nationalist behavior that would actually disrupt supply chains and be detrimental to people around the world.”

a vaccine remains at least 12 to 18 months away, both American officials and the leaders of major pharmaceutical companies say.

“Vaccines are injected into healthy people, so we need to ensure safety,” a process that takes time,

China has made clear it is looking for a national champion — an equivalent to the role that Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant, plays in the race to build 5G networks around the world. If the Huawei pattern holds, China could make deals to increase its influence over poorer or less developed countries, which might otherwise might not get affordable access to a vaccine.

There are already signs that China is using the moment for geopolitical advantage, delivering help to countries that once would have looked to Europe or the United States. Its decision to ship diagnostic kits to the Philippines, an ally of the United States, and to help Serbia was a leading indicator of what may come with drugs and vaccines, when they are available.

In the aftermath of the Ebola plague that flared across West Africa from 2014 to 2016, Norway, Britain and other mostly European countries as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began contributing millions of dollars to a multinational organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Initiatives, to fund vaccine research.

All of its funding agreements included provisions for equal access to assure that “appropriate vaccines are first available to populations when and where they are needed to end an outbreak or curtail an epidemic, regardless of ability to pay,” the organization said in a statement.

In the past two months, the coalition has funded research into eight of the most promising candidates to block the coronavirus — including CureVac, the Germany company.

And now there are significant data about the reliability of the Chinese and Russian vaccines. (It’s still too early to tell for Covaxin.) Trial results in the U.A.E. in early December placed the efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine at 86 percent; others, in China, at 79 percent.

The fact is that no Covid-19 vaccine has been developed or released as transparently as it should have been. And while China and Russia may have botched their rollouts more than some Western companies, that doesn’t necessarily mean their vaccines are shoddy.

Some doctors and activists have put forward proposals to increase the delivery worldwide of vaccines produced in the West. These calls are well-intentioned, but they, too, assume that vaccines from Western countries are the only ones worth having — and waiting for.

There is a simpler solution, already at hand: It’s time to start trusting other countries’ vaccines.

with a population of about a million, Rome was the largest city in Europe or the Mediterranean

The emperors embraced the newcomers, less out of idealism than out of self-interest

The Roman Republic had granted citizenship to all the free people of Italy

The nobles never really accepted other Italians as equals.

As brutal as Roman slavery was it offered many more paths to manumission than American slavery did.

Augustus, the first emperor, was part Roman noble; his other ancestors were wealthy Italians. The first Christian emperor, Constantine, reached the throne nearly 350 year later.

In between these two men came emperors from Spain, North Africa, Croatia, Serbia, and Syria. They reflected the diversity of the empire they had made.

The immigrants changed Rome but Rome changed the immigrants in turn.

Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.

In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.

The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external attack, thanks in part to its geographic location.

As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome.

Even after the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of most eastern Christians.

Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the first great ruler of the Byzantine Empire

Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.

By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.

Known as Iconoclasm—literally “the smashing of images”—the movement waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.

Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian.

Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity

The end of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Near East from 1095 to 1291.

During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine state was crippled, and never regained its former stature.

The fall of Constantinople marked the end of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire.

In the centuries leading up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, law and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.

Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that practiced its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of war, precisely because a peace effort is underway, foreign governments and international peacekeepers are unusually well-placed to intervene. Unlike during armed conflict, there is also a chance for international mediators and local communities to work together to prevent attacks before the damage is done.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, too, cultural reconciliation is still possible. Despite the dismal record of the past three decades, both sides have demonstrated awareness of — and admiration for — heritage that is not their own. In 2019, Armenians restored a prominent 19th-century mosque in Shusha (though they pointedly failed to note its previous use by Azerbaijani Muslims). And in his recent address, Mr. Aliyev acknowledged the importance of the region’s churches — even as he denied their Armenian origin.

that’s what I felt back in those days,” he said, “that everything was for sale — it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash.”

Younger viewers do not have to fear Chase’s wrath, because they are not so obviously its object. They are also able to watch the show for hours on end, which makes the subtext and themes more apparent. Perhaps all of this has offered clarity that was not possible when the show aired. Perhaps it is easier now to see exactly who — or what — Chase was angry at.

it is easily one of the most written-about TV shows in the medium’s short history. But more than the shows that have emerged in its wake, which are subjected to close readings and recaps in nearly every major publication, “The Sopranos” has a novelistic quality that actually withstands this level of scrutiny. It’s not uncommon to hear from people who have watched the series several times, or who do so on a routine basis — people who say it reveals new charms at different points in life

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all, looking back on “The Sopranos” all these years later, is this: What was Chase seeing in the mid-’90s — a period when the United States’ chief geopolitical foe was Serbia, when the line-item veto and school uniforms were front-page news, when “Macarena” topped the charts — that compelled him to make a show that was so thoroughly pessimistic about this country?

“I don’t think I felt like it was a good time,” he told me. He is 76 now, and speaks deliberately and thoughtfully. “I felt that things were going downhill.” He’d become convinced America was, as Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic put it, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” not an easy thing for a journeyman TV writer to accept.

“There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people’s predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap.”

Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”

I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.”

Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”

In “The Mafia: A Cultural History,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a professor of literature at Duke, writes that one thing our cinematic Mafiosi have that we admire, against our better judgment, is access to structures of meaning outside of market forces: the church, family, honor. The Mafia movie often pits these traditional values against the corrosive and homogenizing effects of American life.

What “The Sopranos” shows us, Dainotto argues, is what happens when all that ballast is gone, and the Mafia is revealed to be as ignoble as anything else. “Life is what it is,” he writes, “and repeats as such.”

The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it.

What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.

Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.

In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”

You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack.

The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control.

Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart.

t is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral.

It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway.

Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal.

That the people in power truly had insulated themselves in a fantasy environment — not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also, more concretely, in the endless faux-bucolic subdivisions that would crater the economy. We were living in a sort of irreality, one whose totality would humiliate and delegitimize nearly every important institution in American life when it ended, leaving — of all people — the Meadows and A.J.s of the world to make sense of things.

if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.

Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little Tonys, lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all.

This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to.

In the show’s finale, as the extended Soprano family gathers to mourn the death of Bobby Baccalieri, we find Paulie Walnuts stuck at the kids’ table, where A.J., newly politically awakened, charges into a rant. You people are screwed, he says. “You’re living in a dream.” Bush let Al Qaeda escape, he tells them, and then made us invade some other country? Someone at the table tells him that if he really cares, he should join up. A.J. responds: “It’s more noble than watching these jackoff fantasies on TV of how we’re kicking their ass. It’s like: America.” Again, he’s interrupted: What in the world does he mean? He explains: “This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? And come-ons for [expletive] they don’t need and can’t afford?”

However inartfully, A.J. was gesturing at something that would have been hard for someone his age to see at the time, which is that the ’00s were a sort of fever dream, a tragic farce built on cheap money and propaganda.

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism.

. The “leftist ‘Sopranos’ fan” is now such a well-known type that it is rounding the corner to being an object of scorn and mockery online.

One oddity that can’t be ignored in this “Sopranos” resurgence is that, somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there is an openly left-wing subcurrent within it

With that, Australia’s leaders decided they had seen enough. On Friday, the country’s immigration minister canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa for a second time, putting his bid to win a record 21st Grand Slam title in grave doubt.

In the final tally, a country far from the epicenters of Covid suffering, where sport is a revered forum for right and wrong, has become an enforcer of the collectivist values that the entire world has been struggling to maintain during the pandemic.

Mr. Djokovic sought to play by his own rules. First, he admitted submitting an entry form at the airport that falsely said he had not traveled internationally in the 14 days before he arrived in Melbourne. He had in fact been flying during that time between his native Serbia and Spain. (The misstatement was a “human error,” he said, made by his agent.)

And then there was everything he did during the time he believed he might have been exposed to Covid and eventually, in his telling, tested positive — the Covid diagnosis that enabled his vaccine exemption in the first place.

Five days in December, more or less, sank his chances of winning an unmatched 10th Australian Open, as the world saw what his many critics have described as his selfish and reckless disregard for the health of others.

The next day, before he had received the result, he said, he took a rapid antigen test that came back negative. He then attended a junior tennis ceremony in Belgrade, where photographs show him posing without a mask near children.

Later that day, Dec. 17, Mr. Djokovic said he learned about his positive P.C.R. test result. But he did not then go into 14 days of isolation, as the Serbian government requires.

The following day, Dec. 18, he did a media interview and a photo shoot at his tennis center in Belgrade. He later said he knew he was Covid-positive

his behavior after receiving a positive test seems to be what set the world on edge over his moral compass.

Refusing to get vaccinated was one thing. But withholding the fact that he was infectious?

Many Australians saw in Mr. Djokovic’s actions both dishonesty and a disregard for others. Some questioned whether he had really tested positive in the first place, given the convenient timing for his vaccination exemption.

The community spirit that has defined the country’s virus response — with people grinding through lockdowns and longing for family as borders slammed shut, only to then rush out for vaccines — is in an uncertain place at the moment.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to exploit that urge when he pounced on Mr. Djokovic’s first visa cancellation, tweeting barely an hour after it happened on Jan. 6 that “rules are rules.”

He made the point again on Friday evening after the second visa cancellation was announced, four days after a judge had restored it on procedural grounds.

Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,”

With tens of thousands of new Covid cases every day in Australia, and sky-high vaccination rates among the vulnerable, one athlete does not pose much of a threat.

But the “Djokovic affair” is no longer — and maybe never was — just about science.

Dr. Collignon said that three years into the pandemic, it raised the question of moral judgment. “When do we stop punishing people for making bad decisions?” he asked.

In Australia, the answer is “not yet.”

the decent man is the one who doesn’t infect anyone, as Albert Camus wrote in his 1947 novel “The Plague,” and if the prime minister hadn’t jumped on the cause, someone else probably would have.

Sport is life to many Australians. Participation rates are high, and even watching others compete has been described, for generations, as an activity that builds character.

A “character test” sits at the center of a provision that gives the immigration minister the right to deny or cancel a visa for a wide range of reasons, though in this case, he relied on another section that lets the minister reject a visa if it’s “in the public interest.”

More than two dozen refugees are still in the same hotel where Mr. Djokovic stayed while waiting for the hearing on his first visa cancellation. Some, like Mehdi Ali, a musician who fled Iran when he was 15, have been held by Australia for many years.

But for Mr. Djokovic, Australia’s tough stance on border security seems to have delivered a result that many people can support, even if it means a less interesting Australian Open.

At Melbourne Park on Friday, where Mr. Djokovic had been scheduled to practice after being named the No. 1 seed, fans seemed resigned to the loss of a player who was fun to watch and hard to admire.

No disrespect for him or his tennis ability and that, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t quite sit with the Australian public.”

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) last month urged Congress to adopt “comprehensive” regulations on the AI industry.

Rather than focusing on AI technology that lets the general public create unique content like the chatbots and image generators, Chinese companies have instead focused on technologies with clear commercial uses, like surveillance tech.

n a recent study, Ding found that most of the large language models developed in China were nearly two years behind those developed in the U.S., a gap that would be a challenge to close — even if American firms had to adjust to regulation.

This gap also makes it difficult for Chinese firms to attract the world’s top engineering talent. Many would prefer to work at firms that have the resources and flexibility to experiment on frontier research areas.

Restrictions on access to the most advanced chips, which are needed to run AI models, have added to these difficulties.

Recent research identified 17 large language models in China that relied on Nvidia chips, and just three models that used Chinese-made chips.

While Beijing pushes to make comparable chips at home, Chinese AI companies have to source their chips any way they can — including from a black market that has sprung up in Shenzhen, where, according to Reuters, the most advanced Nvidia chips sell for nearly $20,000, more than twice what they go for elsewhere.

Despite the obstacles, Chinese AI companies have made major advances in some types of AI technologies, including facial recognition, gait recognition, and artificial and virtual reality.

These technologies have also fueled the development of China’s vast surveillance industry, giving Chinese tech giants an edge that they market around the world, such as Huawei’s contracts for smart city surveillance from Belgrade, Serbia, to Nairobi.

Companies developing AI in China need to comply with specific laws on intellectual property rights, personal information protection, recommendation algorithms and synthetic content, also called deep fakes. In April, regulators also released a draft set of rules on generative AI, the technology behind image generator Stable Diffusion and chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

They also need to ensure AI generated content complies with Beijing’s strict censorship regime. Chinese tech companies such as Baidu have become adept at filtering content that contravenes these rules. But it has hampered their ability to test the limits of what AI can do.

No Chinese tech company has yet been able to release a large language model on the scale of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the general public, in which the company has asked the public to play with and test a generative AI model, said Ding, the professor at George Washington University.

“That level of freedom has not been allowed in China, in part because the Chinese government is very worried about people creating politically sensitive content,” Ding said.

Although Beijing’s regulations have created major burdens for Chinese AI companies, analysts say that they contain several key principles that Washington can learn from — like protecting personal information, labeling AI-generated content and alerting the government if an AI develops dangerous capabilities.

AI regulation in the United States could easily fall short of Beijing’s heavy-handed approach while still preventing discrimination, protecting people’s rights and adhering to existing laws, said Johanna Costigan, a research associate at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“There can be alignment between regulation and innovation,” Costigan said. “But it’s a question of rising to the occasion of what this moment represents — do we care enough to protect people who are using this technology? Because people are using it whether the government regulates it or not.”

The war in Ukraine has emerged as the first armed conflict in a struggle between three twenty-first century great powers, the United States, Russia, and China--the Oceana, Eurasia and East Asia that Orwell predicted in 1984.  While Russia is trying to destroy the post-1989 settlement that emerged in Europe after the USSR collapsed, the United States and the EU and an enlarged NATO are trying to maintain it.

Meanwhile, tensions have grown steadily between the United States and China over Taiwan

Germany in 1914 decided to back Austria to the hilt in its demands against Serbia because the German government wanted a trial of strength with France and Russia, whom they thought they could either humiliate diplomatically or defeat militarily.  The men and women in charge of US foreign policy today clearly still believe that our will should prevail anywhere on the globe, and might not be averse to military action to make that point.

In this kind of environment, the greatest powers regard any defeat by one of their allies as a potentially disastrous shift in the balance of power.  That is why the United States is doing so much to support Ukraine, and it is one reason that President Biden immediately announced the strongest possible support for Israel, including conventional military support even though Israel is not facing a conventional war. 

The United States, to my horror, has been trying to improve its relations with Saudi Arabia, which would definitely make Washington a partner in an anti-Iranian alliance in the Middle East.  There is even talk of Israel normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, which might draw it into such an alliance.  

If Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia decided to attack Iran, Russia--which has friendly relations with Iran now--might join in on Iran's side.  It would be extremely difficult for the United States to maintain its generous support for Ukraine while also fighting such a conflict ourselves.  And with the United States involved in two different conflicts already, Beijing might easily decide that the time to invade Taiwan had come.  Suddenly we would be in the midst of a third world war.

Most important of all, Iran is another player in the situation that could easily escalate it. 

The Arab-Israeli tragedy continues.  Four generations of Palestinians have now grown up under occupation, each one at least as hostile to Israel as the last.  75 years of conflict, combined with demographic changes, have made Israel a very different country than it was before 1967.  Despite its repeated failure to impose its will on the Palestinians, the Israeli government is now the verge of its most destructive effort to do so yet in Gaza.  It speaks of destroying Hamas, and Netanyahu has even advised Gazans to flee--but there are about two million of them living in the most densely populated political entity on earth, and they have nowhere to flee to.

A great power makes a mistake, in my opinion, when it ties its destiny to that of a smaller power in the midst of an endless war.  The real responsibility of great powers is to keep in mind the ultimate objective of any war--"which is to bring about peace," as Clausewitz said.  That is what Germany could and should have done in 1914, and what several American presidents tried to do in the Middle East.  It does not seem to be our policy now.

The implications for China extend beyond Ukraine, and even Europe.

“He’s damned if he did know, and damned if he didn’t,” Paul Haenle, a former director for China on the National Security Council, said of whether Mr. Xi had been aware of Russia’s plans to invade. “If he did know and he didn’t tell people, he’s complicit; if he wasn’t told by Putin, it’s an affront.”

In any case, the invasion evidently surprised many in Beijing’s establishment

Mr. Xi’s statement with Mr. Putin on Feb. 4 endorsed a Russian security proposal that would exclude Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Even so, as Mr. Putin became determined to reverse Ukraine’s turn to Western security protections, Chinese officials began to echo Russian arguments. Beijing also saw a growing threat from American-led military blocs.

“Putin may have done this anyway, but also it was unquestionably an enabling backdrop that was provided by the joint statement, the visit and Xi’s association with all of these things,”

“He owns that relationship with Putin,” Mr. Haenle said. “If you’re suggesting in the Chinese system right now that it was not smart to get that close to Russia, you’re in effect criticizing the leader.”

For decades it sought to build ties with Russia while also keeping Ukraine close.

Over the past years, as growing numbers of Ukrainians supported joining NATO, Chinese diplomats did not raise objections with Kyiv, said Sergiy Gerasymchuk, an analyst with Ukrainian Prism, a foreign policy research organization in Kyiv.

For both leaders, their partnership was an answer to Mr. Biden’s effort to forge an “alliance of democracies.”

Before and shortly after the invasion, Beijing sounded sympathetic to Moscow’s security demands, mocking Western warnings of war and accusing the United States of goading Russia. Over the past two weeks, though, China has sought to edge slightly away from Russia. It has softened its tone, expressing grief over civilian casualties. It has cast itself as an impartial party, calling for peace talks and for the war to stop as soon as possible.

Beijing had its own complaints with NATO, rooted in the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, during NATO’s war in 1999 to protect a breakaway region, Kosovo. Those suspicions deepened when NATO in 2021 began to describe China as an emerging challenge to the alliance.

n Feb. 23, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, accused Washington of “manufacturing panic.”

Chinese officials tweaked their calls to heed Russia’s security, stressing that “any country’s legitimate security concerns should be respected.” They still did not use the word “invasion,” but have acknowledged a “conflict between Ukraine and Russia.”

“Many decision makers in China began to perceive relations in black and white: either you are a Chinese ally or an American one,”

“They still want to remain sort of neutral, but they bitterly failed.”