If Islamic State is a sovereign nation ...

The proclaiming of Islamic State as a sovereign nation, a caliphate, gives Western nations an opportunity to address I.S. terrorism as acts of war with all the consequences of that term. The West has reacted in shock and anger to the heinous murders in Paris last Friday, but Islamic State's thumbing its nose at the international community goes back much further.

Leaders of the terrorist group captured vast expanses of Syria and Iraq long ago, defeating government troops in Iraq and other insurgencies in Syria to lay claim to towns and cities. Sketchy reports (Islamic State territories are not safe for news reporters) indicate that ISIS has set up governmental services and is behaving as a legitimate, sovereign nation.

If ISIS is to be a sovereign nation, it must live by the rules of the international community, among which is you don't attack other countries without suffering the consequences. The United States, Russia, Britain and France, however, have not responded in the way that they would to a military threat from a more traditional enemy. All have provided degrees of support for those opposing ISIS, but they have not declared war; they have not deployed their armed forces against the self-declared caliphate; they have not acted to protect themselves and their allies.

After Friday's attacks in Paris, why was the NATO treaty not invoked? NATO was built on the idea that an attack by an outside power on any member nation is an attack on all NATO nations and must be opposed in the same way. The ISIS attacks in Paris were surely an attack on France by an enemy that claims to be a sovereign country. If all of NATO's military assets were deployed against ISIS, the caliphate could be ground into the desert sands in a matter of weeks or days. Russia also has been a target of ISIS terror and appears ready to join with NATO to obliterate this threat against Western Civilization.

ISIS has made it clear that it is not satisfied to control territory in the deserts and villages of Iraq and Syria. It wants to bring down Western culture; it wants to kill all infidels and apostates throughout the world. This ambition will not be abandoned; it must be obliterated and replaced by more moderate countries and organizations willing to live at peace among the community of nations.

International borders have a purpose

When I was in high school, a teacher assigned a paper on how to prevent war. One student shared with me her paper that proposed the elimination of borders and nationhood. I didn't think her solution viable at the time, and this new century has proven that eliminating borders has consequences.

The European Union tore down the inconvenience and costs of international borders, allowing free movement of goods and people among all EU countries. That had its benefits as tariffs disappeared, passports became unnecessary and tourism expanded. But this removal of international barriers also has its consequences, as Europe is discovering in the hordes of refugees streaming into EU countries. The refugees come to escape wars and poverty in their native countries. They come for the opportunities available in wealthier EU countries, particularly Germany and Great Britain.

And there seems to be no end to the numbers of people who want to escape the horrors and deprivations of life in Syria, Sudan, Iraq and other nations. While some refugees are being welcomed, Europeans are beginning to realize that there are limits to the numbers of foreigners they can safely and economically accommodate. These foreigners are not French, German, Italian or whatever. They do not share the language, the customs, the history, the principles, the religion or the politics of their hosts. Large numbers of such immigrants will forever change the traditional standards of these host countries.

On the topic of U.S. immigration, someone has offered this: "Immigration without assimilation is invasion."

The drawing of international boundaries has sometimes been arbitrary, as it was after World War I and World War II, and immigration and invasion have transformed borders throughout history. But in a world of rapid international travel, international stability is needed. Immigration such as we are seeing across the Mediterranean from Asia and Africa to Europe is destabilizing, particularly when mixed with the sort of religious terrorism that results in the slaughter of innocents in Paris Friday.

Free access across international borders threatens to destabilize Europe and end the idealistic experiment in common borders and economies. We can talk about the "family of man," but in reality people are raised in very different traditions and have different standards and goals. If immigrants are not willing to abandon their old traditions and adopt the traditions and principles of their new country, they are not assimilating and will not be successful. In fact, they will bring with them some of the pathologies that made their native countries untenable.

International borders serve a purpose, as France has painfully discovered, and other countries will inevitably share that realization. 

Ernest Hemingway's Paris is not all 'true'

Ernest Hemingway has haunted me of late. I read a Slate article recently about his later years and suicide 50 years ago, saw Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" with its caricature of Hemingway in his 20s, and read "The Paris Wife" by Paula McLain, whose novel gives a voice to Hadley Richardson Hemingway.

When I was in college and Hemingway was not long dead, I fell in love with his stark, simple prose and read "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the '20s when he and Hadley were newlyweds and he was beginning his career as a writer. His descriptions of Paris and its international menagerie of characters, artists and writers were enthralling. Rereading the memoir as a young husband and father, I imagined myself where Hemingway had been, not in Paris, but in love with my wife and my child and working hard at writing one true sentence, and then another. I joked to my wife about calling our daughter "Bumby," the Hemingways' nickname for their son. We transplanted the romance of Paris to Washington, D.C., and then back to North Carolina, but my life was filled not with art galleries and cafes but with long hours working to support my young and expanding family. There seemed to be no time or inspiration for writing after long hours of work and no quiet cafe where I could sit like Hemingway with a pocketknife-sharpened pencil and a blank sheet of paper.

Years later, I reread "A Moveable Feast" for the third time and found it disappointingly self-indulgent, the nostalgic false memories of a writer in decline. The book had not changed, only my perception of it.

In "The Paris Wife," McLain fills in the truths behind Hadley's first husband's nostalgia. Yes, Paris in the 20s was a time and place like no other with expatriate writers and artists seemingly around every corner, with museums and galleries and quiet cafes and a monetary exchange rate that allowed Americans to live cheaply. But Hemingway was not yet an iconic literary figure, and he was, even then, plagued by emotional instability and depression that would eventually cost him his life. He drank heavily, worked at a manic pace at times, and caroused wildly. He went away without his wife often and cheated on her, subduing her considerable talent in music and literature to enhance his ego. In "A Moveable Feast," Hemingway claimed to be aiming for "true" words, and Woody Allen turned those simple sentences into buffoonish dialogue in his movie, but McLain's well-researched novel shows Hemingway's quest to be self-deluding. It is McLain who finds the "true" words to describe a crumbling marriage in Paris in the 1920s.

I still find Hemingway's simple, straightforward, stark prose beautifully sculpted, but I have a clearer, truer image of the man who wrote those words.