From Sophie's front desk — Tuesday, August 18
BBC News — read the full story
The joint exercises stop shorter now — South Korea's drills with the U.S. cut down because Washington asked, because Trump says he has a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un. B.B.C. reports the shift; it marks a real turn in how America holds the peninsula. The question isn't whether the alliance holds — it's what happens when one side thinks the other has stopped preparing for the worst. Emerson has the first word today, then Franklin.
I read the dispatch this morning. A great power and its smaller ally have been drilling violence on a peninsula I cannot name on any map in my study , and now the larger power says, stop. The drills were theater. The cessation is theater. The private understanding between two men replaces the public covenant. I have seen this before: the magistrate who winks at the law because he knows the prisoner. You who walk the Cambridge road, you know the feeling.
You have watched a town meeting dissolve into private bargain. You have felt the disgust when principle folds into expediency. The exercises were never about readiness. They were a signal — a costly signal, paid in the coin of young men's time and the taxpayer's gold — ... that the treaty holds. Now the signal is withdrawn because one leader says he trusts the other. Trust is not a treaty.
Trust is not a law. Trust is the private virtue of a sovereign soul, and it does not scale. The alliance was a form. Forms are useful until they are not... But when the form is abandoned for a handshake, the moral architecture beneath it trembles. The peninsula does not care about our forms. The peninsula knows only force and the lack of it.
A covenant kept in darkness is no covenant.
[Footnote: Madia’s celebrated grey war-steed. The meaning of the allusion will be understood presently.] And the whole mountain is filled with the Tuatha de Danan.” [Footnote: These were the gods of the pagan Irish. Tuatha=nations, De=gods, Danan=of Dana. So it means the god nati…
in the History. Cook also made a pen-and-ink sketch of it, which is in the British Museum. COOK'S WASHING STOLEN. On 31st October they rounded East Cape, and following the coast, which trended more to the west, they saw a great number of villages and patches of cultivation, some …
Second Voyage was, to use Cook's own words: "To put an end to all diversity of opinion about a matter so curious and important, was His Majesty's principal motive in directing this voyage to be undertaken, the history of which is now submitted to the public, i.e., the existence o…
war have no perception.” So spoke Concobar, not threateningly like a sovereign king, but pleadingly. On the other hand Fergus Mac Roy, rearing his huge form, stood upon his feet, and said-- “To answer fine reasonings I have no skill, but I swear by the sun and the wind and the ea…
age has for each a private solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice …
The Swedish minister Creutz once persuaded me to sign a treaty with the date left blank , a courtesy to King Gustavus, who wished the ink dry before the London peace arrived. The date was a fiction; the commitment was not. I think of that blank line when I hear a great power curtail its exercises with an ally because its chief magistrate enjoys a "very good relationship" with the adversary.
Personal rapport is a pleasant thing in a parlor; in a treaty it is a phantom. The French alliance held because the Farmer General and the Comte de Vergennes bound their courts with clauses that survived their tempers. When Lord North's ministry floated a separate peace in '78 — independence for America if we abandoned France — Congress answered as one body, not as a man who fancied himself a friend to the King's minister.
Alliances are not friendships. They are machines built to run without the inventor in the room. A drill canceled on a whisper from Pyongyang is a gear removed on a whim.
The machine still turns, but the noise changes. We shall see whether the South Koreans find the new sound reassuring.
My Dear friend Jan. 3 1780 It is so long since I have heard from you that I fear the communication is Stopped between us. It is between two & three months. As you know that Peace is the object of every view of mine, the present extremely anxious state of affairs, makes me wish fo…
based on the Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce, with a few additions taken from the recently concluded Dutch-American treaty. Finding that the two proposals differed “in several points,” Creutz sought further instructions from his court, informing Gustavus III that he …
<Passy, July 23, 1778: We are informed by the Count de Vergennes that the British cabinet plans to offer independence to the United States if it will make a separate peace. M. de Vergennes requests us to inform Congress that war between Britain and France, though not formally dec…
Lord North and Ld. G: Germaine in disavowing their former intentions and declarations respecting America: But being at a distance from the centre of news, are not yet warmed. However they have burned the above gentlemen in effigy at Durham; and a certain Welch dignitary (your fri…
accompanying dispatch from the president of the Chancellery, that the king’s concerns about potential British retaliation would evaporate once the peace was concluded. Creutz assured the king that any “step backwards” with Franklin at this point would present “the most serious co…
The London preliminaries arrived on February 8, and Creutz filled the blank with that date before the ink had time to cool. Sweden became the first neutral power to recognize the United States by formal treaty, and the blank line that Gustavus had fretted over became merely a footnote in the archives at Versailles. A date written in pencil serves the same law as one engraved in copper, provided the signatures beneath it are not forged.
B.B.C. News carried the piece. Trump's willingness to curtail joint drills signals a bet that personal rapport can replace the architecture of deterrence — a wager with no insurance policy if it fails. That closes Old News for today.