Evan Vucci/AP

Donald Trump arrives at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, Nov. 6, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promises were sweeping, delivered with bravado.

On Day 1 alone, then-candidate Trump pledged to begin mass deportations, pardon Jan. 6 rioters, start dismantling the “deep state,” end the Green New Deal, cut federal funding for schools pushing “radical gender ideology,” and “drill, baby, drill” – shorthand for increasing production of fossil fuels.

President-elect Trump won’t be a dictator – “except on Day 1,” he famously said last year.

Over the decades, American presidents have wielded expanding power up front by signing stacks of executive orders. President Joe Biden signed a record 42 such actions in his first 100 days, many of them undoing the policies of Mr. Trump, his predecessor. Now, with the former president returning to office in January after a sweeping election victory, his pen is ready.

Executive power has its limits, and civil liberties groups will be watching Mr. Trump’s actions closely. There will be lawsuits, which could tie up some orders in court. Some orders, too, are likely to require congressional action.

Still, expect Day 1 – and the 99 days that follow – to be bracing. During the campaign, Mr. Trump spoke of going after political opponents, be it unnamed “radical leftists” or named Democratic leaders whom he has called “the enemy from within.”

Last week, informal Trump adviser and richest-man-in-the-world Elon Musk said on the social platform X that special counsel Jack Smith’s “abuse of the justice system cannot go unpunished.” He was referring to the two federal cases brought against the former president, one for alleged mishandling of classified documents and the other for allegedly plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Mr. Smith is already putting the two federal cases against Mr. Trump on hold. On Sunday, Trump surrogates sought to cool the temperature around fears of retribution.

“There’s no enemies list,” Florida GOP Rep. Byron Donalds said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We’re the party who’s against going after your opponents using lawfare,” House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan added on CNN, referring to the federal and state prosecutions of Mr. Trump that are now expected to disappear.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Senior Trump campaign adviser Susie Wiles attends a campaign rally at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Nov. 4, 2024. Ms. Wiles will be President-elect Donald Trump's White House chief of staff, the first woman to hold that position.

An immediate focus on the border

Mr. Trump is likely to focus initially on his domestic policy agenda. Exit polls showed the economy and immigration topping voter concerns, and those are policy areas where Mr. Trump appears eager to show quick results.

On Sunday night, the president-elect announced that Tom Homan, former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, will serve as “border czar,” in charge of the boundaries with Mexico and Canada as well as U.S. airspace and coastline. Mr. Homan’s position does not require Senate confirmation; he stepped down from the first Trump administration after his brash style hindered his confirmation.

Also on tap to fill a senior White House role is longtime Trump aide Stephen Miller, a well-known hard-liner on immigration. Multiple outlets have reported that Mr. Miller will be deputy chief of staff for policy, a title that is likely to understate his influence. Vice President-elect JD Vance posted his congratulations on X.

Earlier, Mr. Trump named his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, as White House chief of staff. Ms. Wiles will be the first woman to hold that position, and is a highly regarded political strategist – but has never worked in government.

Mr. Trump is said to respect Ms. Wiles in a way that he didn’t respect the four people who cycled through that post his first term. Part of her job will be to instill order in the Oval Office, preventing people from coming and going at will, something that didn’t happen in the first Trump term. But it’s unclear if she’ll be able to steer Mr. Trump away from doing things that may be ill-advised or unconstitutional.

“Has he found somebody who can rattle the cage and say, ‘Look, you can’t do this – it will hurt the country; it’s wasteful’?” says Paul Light, an expert on governance at New York University. He has his doubts.

The most disruptive initiative in Trump 2.0 might be his plan to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border on Day 1 and launch the biggest deportation of unauthorized migrants in U.S. history. Initial plans reportedly include a declaration of national emergency that would allow use of Pentagon funds to pay for the effort, including detention on military bases and deportation costs.

The operation could target up to 20 million people, according to the Trump team, with a goal of deporting a million people a year. The plan is to focus first on migrants who have committed crimes beyond entering the United States illegally, or who pose a national security threat. But in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” last month, Mr. Homan made clear that the deportation initiative wouldn’t end there.

Evan Vucci/AP

Then-candidate Donald Trump listens to Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council, as he tours the southern border with Mexico, Aug. 22, 2024, in Sierra Vista, Arizona.

“It will be targeted arrests,” Mr. Homan said, not mass sweeps of neighborhoods. But when asked about a return of the family separations of the first Trump term, he didn’t rule it out. An unauthorized migrant who has a child in the U.S. “has created that crisis.”

The initiative would require a significant increase in trained personnel and, according to the liberal American Immigration Council, could cost tens of billions of dollars a year. It could also have a significant impact on the economy, as workers in service industries and agriculture are detained and expelled. But the Trump transition team says the election gives him a mandate to act.

Easing regulations and cleaning house

On the energy front, Mr. Trump’s plan to “drill, baby, drill” aims to cut consumer costs. He’s expected to pull out (again) from the Paris Agreement on climate change, ease regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, and end a pause on permits for liquefied natural gas export projects.

What the Trump team doesn’t point out is that Mr. Biden presided over record levels of U.S. oil production as his administration approved new drilling permits. But Mr. Biden restricted drilling on public lands, a policy Mr. Trump is expected to reverse.

“I will terminate the ‘green new scam’ and will cut your energy prices in half, 50%, within one year from Jan. 20,” Mr. Trump said at his Oct. 27 rally in Madison Square Garden.

Another Day 1 priority is likely to be a revival of his Schedule F initiative. The measure, launched late in his first term and rescinded immediately by President Biden, would remove the job security of some 50,000 civil servants, allowing for them to be fired at will. Mr. Trump has long claimed the “deep state” undermined his agenda during his first term.

The conservative Heritage Foundation has made revival of Schedule F part of its Project 2025 initiative to help the incoming Trump administration, including a list of vetted replacements for fired civil servants. Mr. Trump has distanced himself from the controversial program, but observers still expect some aspects – including Schedule F – to be implemented.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Members of the Taiwanese navy stand in front of a mobile missile launcher during Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s visit to the base in response to recent Chinese military drills, in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Oct. 18, 2024.

After months of jitters among many U.S. allies about the possibility of a second presidency for Donald Trump, world leaders are now preparing for his arrival on the global security scene.

At NATO headquarters and in defense ministries around the globe, staffers are poring over old policy papers by Mr. Trump’s advisers to puzzle out how the incoming administration will wield U.S. military power and money.

What’s clear is that Mr. Trump is unconventional, unpredictable, and transactional – traits that are likely to double as the de facto strategic guideposts for the next four years.

While there’s a lot that could go wrong with a way forward that revels in policy surprises while also placing storied alliances on more quid pro quo footing, there are some crises that Mr. Trump could have a shot at moving in a productive direction, analysts say. This includes bringing an end to stalemate in Ukraine, holding China in check, and establishing a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

“Foreign leaders need to know that they will be dealing with a real estate mogul, not with a statesman. Trump will be out there trying to cut deals and asking, ‘What have you done for me lately?’” notes Charles Kupchan, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“I share the concern that the U.S. has just elected someone who is fundamentally unfit for office,” he said in a postelection discussion co-sponsored by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and the German Marshall Fund.

At the same time, he added, “Quite honestly, he will bring a certain realism to foreign policy that is overdue.”

Ukraine

This starts with the war in Ukraine. The Biden administration has long promised that the United States will back Kyiv for “as long as it takes.” But it also delayed the arrival and use of critical weapons that could have turned the tide on the battlefield for fear of escalating with Russia, a fellow nuclear power.

Ukrainian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP/File

Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with U.S Javelin missiles during military exercises in the Donetsk region in Ukraine, Jan. 12, 2022.

This, critics say, has amounted to a policy without a strategy and allowed Kyiv to reach a stalemate but, despite mighty effort, not move beyond it.

Retired Gen. Mark Milley, no fan of Mr. Trump, argued during his tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Ukraine needs to prepare to negotiate with Russia. This will involve terms that Kyiv will almost certainly find unacceptable.

Specifically, it will mean conceding, conservatively, 20% of its territory – including Crimea and the Donbas region – to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court. The benefit, analysts say, is the chance to end the war before Ukraine becomes a failed state.

One policy paper being circulated among NATO staffers, co-written in April by retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg and former National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz for the America First Policy Institute, argues that while seeking a cease-fire, the U.S. could partially lift Russian sanctions, and only fully remove them after Moscow signs a peace deal acceptable to Kyiv. In the meantime, the U.S. would continue to strengthen Ukraine’s defenses to ensure Moscow makes “no further advances and will not attack again.”

During a phone call with Mr. Putin last week, President-elect Trump warned him not to escalate fighting in Ukraine.

These are signals that run somewhat counter to the perception that “Trump is just going to turn the [military aid] spigot off,” says a senior NATO official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The official noted that the president-elect was the first leader to send Kyiv over 200 Javelin anti-tank missiles, which were instrumental in staving off the initial Russian onslaught.

The concern is that any quick peace deal would equal victory for Moscow, rewarding it for despotic aggression and potentially emboldening China to invade Taiwan.

China and Taiwan

When Mr. Trump was asked by the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal why Beijing wouldn’t invade Taiwan on his watch, the now-president-elect said that Chinese leader Xi Jinping “knows that I’m [expletive] crazy.”

This means, he suggested, that the U.S. wouldn’t have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan. Such confidence calls into question what will happen to the security partnerships that President Joe Biden has expanded with Pacific allies such as Japan and the Philippines. But the first Trump administration cultivated counterweights to Chinese military ambition in the region as well.

Though Mr. Trump famously said on the campaign trail that Taiwan should pay for U.S. protection, he also sold Taiwan long-range missiles that could hit distant Chinese targets in one of the largest weapons transfers ever to the island – something previous presidents had been unwilling to do for fear of upsetting Beijing.

What’s clear is that Mr. Trump has the potential to reopen dialogue with what the national security community views with bipartisan agreement as America’s top adversary.

While President Biden has often seen U.S. national security as a clash between democracy and autocracy, tackling the security challenges of the 21st century requires working across ideological divides, said Dr. Kupchan, who served as a National Security Council director under President Barack Obama.

“I think [Trump] will be more pragmatic in the sense of working with democracies and nondemocracies alike. ... In fact, he seems to like autocrats.”

The Middle East

Vice President-elect JD Vance, an Iraq War veteran, has been outspoken about the need for the U.S. to stop fighting what he has referred to as “stupid” wars in the Middle East.

Even so, Mr. Trump is expected to overwhelmingly support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah. This would bolster the Trump White House’s likely efforts to resurrect its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in an effort to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Sebastian Scheiner/AP/File

Then-President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands at the Israel museum in Jerusalem, May 23, 2017.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, embracing Mr. Trump’s unpredictability and pride in personal relationships, seems to hold out some hope, however, of working with the president-elect to end the war in Gaza.

Following the July assassination attempt on Mr. Trump, President Abbas sent a get-well letter to Mr. Trump, who publicly thanked him and promised to work for peace.

The concern is that he may do this in a way that most benefits Israel, including allowing it to annex parts of the West Bank.

The hope is that the 2020 Abraham Accords – which created unprecedented security, economic, and diplomatic ties between Israel and a number of its Arab neighbors – could lay a foundation for the “dawn of a new Middle East,” as Mr. Trump promoted it.

Despite the war in Gaza, none of the signatories have withdrawn, though cooperation has shifted to more private communication lines, noted Marcy Grossman, former Canadian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, in a piece for the Atlantic Council.

The accord provides “room for hope” in the region, she wrote, as it spurs shifting security alliances and more people-to-people engagement.

The latter in particular, Ambassador Grossman argues, offers “a powerful counter to dehumanization, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia” – in other words, to the tenacious roots of the war.

When Cyclone Remal gathered force off the Bay of Bengal in late May, Jahidul Bepari had everything to fear.

Living in a makeshift home of tin and discarded planks of wood on the outskirts of Sarankhola, along the banks of the Baleshwar River, the teenager and his family had lost their livelihoods from extreme weather so many times they don’t keep count.

This time, though, the storm was particularly fierce – one of the most intense to hit coastal Bangladesh, and the millions of people who live there, in recent years.

“It started with drizzling rain; then the wind started to become heavy with heavy rain. Even though it was a low-tide time in the morning, the water level began to rise more and more. I became very afraid. I was standing on the road in front of our home,” he says. “As the road is basically a riverbank, and erosion happened, I fell in the water. I am a very good swimmer; I came back.”

His family immediately sought shelter. But after three days of pounding rain and flooding as the river breached its banks, they lost their house, which was crushed and blown away by the wind. They lost their stores of rice and a small well they used for fish farming. The 30 pigeons that they bred and sold for the equivalent of $2 apiece flew away. They lost their chicken and ducks, too. But when he is asked about the storm, his thoughts first race to the family’s goat. She was pregnant when she drowned.

“We’re really struggling with the post-Remal situation,” he says.

Low-lying Bangladesh offers a glimpse of the world’s future

Situated at the head of the Bay of Bengal, low-lying Bangladesh is considered one of the most climate-affected countries in the world – exposed to cyclones, heat waves, and floods. It is also, according to many climate experts, a glimpse of the world’s future.

This is partly because of what the country reveals about extreme weather. But Bangladesh also demonstrates what that extreme weather means for young people like Jahidul, and how governments, families, and individuals are adapting and transforming all aspects of life in the face of spectacular climatic uncertainty that has spared no part of the world.

“What we’re seeing over the last couple of years is extremes that we don’t expect,” says Rebecca Carter, director of climate adaptation and resilience for the World Resources Institute’s global office. “Five years ago, people were saying, ‘You want to find a safe place? Move to the Pacific Northwest. ... It’s not going to get too extreme there.’ We know that’s not true.”

That is why for much of 2023, the Monitor traveled around the world to talk to young people – the generation coming of age on a warming planet, the ones who will live through the more powerful cyclones, the deeper floods, and the longer droughts. We called this the Climate Generation, and it remains in our thought – including now as this year’s global climate summit, known as COP29, is occurring in Baku, Azerbaijan.

What we found was that from Portugal to the United States, from Namibia to Barbados, these young people are reimagining how to live, eat, work, and find purpose. They are suing their elected leaders to demand change, building climate advocacy from the ground up, building small businesses harnessing cleaner energies, creating food systems that are more sustainable, and shifting their lifestyles to fit this global challenge.

They have no choice.

Extreme weather events cause billions of dollars in damage

Since we published the seven-part series, the world has watched more communities struggle through weather-related disasters, forever changing in the face of them.

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

In the U.S., a resident digs out after Hurricane Helene brought mudslides to Swannanoa, North Carolina, Oct. 7, 2024.

As we started writing this article, flash flooding swept away roads and cars in the U.S. state of Connecticut after what meteorologists called a 1-in-1,000-year storm. We began editing it as Hurricane Helene, which had intensified rapidly because of warmer than ever water in the Gulf of Mexico, devastated the southeastern U.S., flattening whole communities with its floods and landslides.

Those were just two of the dozens of superlative weather events causing billions of dollars in damage around the globe.

Heat waves across South Asia, from Bangladesh to the Philippines, killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people, shuttering schools across the region. Two Indian cities in Andhra Pradesh exceeded all previous records with temperatures logged at 46.3 degrees Celsius, or 115 degrees Fahrenheit. A heat dome in Mexico, a naturally occurring phenomenon that scientists say is intensified by climate change, killed more than 100 people, as well as wildlife, across the affected region.

This summer, extreme heat reached even the rarest corners of the world. Several communities in the far north of Canada, above the Arctic Circle, recorded their hottest temperatures ever. And wildfires raged from Greece and Turkey to Canada’s Jasper National Park.

It was the type of summer that many of the young people we interviewed said they both feared and expected to become more common.

Those fears and expectations are rooted in climate science. We know that Earth is getting warmer. We also know that much of this increase in temperature is because of human behavior, such as burning fossil fuels and sending heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And because of the greenhouse gases we have already put into the air, we know the heating will continue throughout the lives of young people like Jahidul.

Jahidul was a young teen when we met him last year, and he did not talk about climate change as an issue, or even as a concept. But he shared the story of the last time his house had washed away, four years ago in a ferocious nighttime storm. He still had trouble sleeping, he said. When he saw cracks in the riverbank, he knew something terrible might happen.

A year later, Jahidul’s experience seems even more reflective of what young people globally might face during their lifetimes.

From Bangladesh to London to Florida, a shared challenge

For sure, at first glance, Jahidul’s daily experience looks nothing like that of a teenager in the U.S. or Europe. Like a quarter of his nation, he lives below the poverty line. And that affects how harshly his family is impacted by severe weather. As many who work in the field of climate disasters will explain, the impact of climate change has less to do with supercharged weather events themselves than with the intersection between extreme weather and vulnerability.

But it is no longer just the poorest communities bearing the intense consequences of climate change. Jahidul and his family and his country have one particular collection of risk factors. But vulnerabilities exist across geography and socioeconomic levels, from the shores of Bangladesh to the mountains of North Carolina.

Those on the more progressive side of the political spectrum tend to focus on those risks that come with socioeconomic disparity, whether geopolitical or domestic. Lower-income Americans of color, for instance, are more likely to suffer the effects of urban heat islands – those paved areas of cities where temperatures spike higher than in surrounding areas. They’re also less likely to have the financial means to deal with that heat. Lower-income countries, such as Namibia and Barbados, have less money in government coffers either to improve infrastructure ahead of extreme weather events or to repair after them. This is why many policymakers in the Global South, led by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, are pushing for a reimagining of the international financial system.

But those living in London or Florida or Vermont are not free from vulnerability, either. And while it’s certainly true that those with fewer means have less ability to shield themselves when heat waves or floods or wildfires hit, it’s also true that nobody can avoid these extremes, which are hitting at unexpected times and in unexpected places.

Experts are quick to say that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. Humans still have a lot of agency regarding how much the planet will warm, and a lot of science suggests that every fraction of a degree matters when it comes to extreme weather events and sea level rise. But equally important, a growing number of experts point out, is how societies will adjust to prepare for this new, warmer reality.

Bangladesh holds lessons for the rest of the world

Bangladeshis have shown resilience at every level. The country has been cited as one of the most climate-adaptive countries in the world, helping keep thousands more alive today during natural disasters than in previous generations.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A fortification on the banks of the Baleshwar River was built to stop the riverbank from collapsing, Sept. 22, 2023, in Sarankhola, Bangladesh. The area used to be filled with homes.

“The first step should always be [to consider], What are my vulnerabilities now and in the future?” says Libby Zemaitis, senior manager for resilience programs and policy at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. “And that can be done at a community level, at a resident level, at a business level.”

Jahidul’s family knew the cyclone was coming. An intercom system, run by the government’s disaster preparedness committee, warned them two days prior. Such committees operate across the country, run by locals trained to identify and monitor weather risks and spread the news via cellphone, via intercom, or any way they can.

After Jahidul fell in the river, his family fled to the local elementary school where he studied until grade five. That school serves as the local shelter during natural disasters. It is one of thousands that the government runs as part of a cyclone preparedness program for the 40 million people who live across a 710-kilometer (441-mile) coastal plain. This climate resilience program has received international accolades – and has saved thousands of lives. That preparedness training has increased here in Sarankhola district since 2007, after Cyclone Sidr killed some 3,500 people.

Jahidul’s family stayed for almost three weeks. After all, the river had flooded their land, and they had nowhere to go until the water receded. His was one of 150,000 homes destroyed in the wake of Cyclone Remal. But he, and his family, had survived.

“The U.S. and Bangladesh are very different countries, but Bangladesh is well regarded as a leader in climate change adaptation,” Dr. Carter says. “They have no choice.”

This story was produced as part of the Monitor’s Nov. 4 issue of the Monitor Weekly. Visit your local library or a Christian Science Reading Room to purchase a copy of this expanded issue dedicated to the Climate Generation. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly delivered to your home.

When Ukrainian combat medic Dmytro Shandra writes poetry about his life on the front line, he does so in Russian.

It comes naturally. The son of schoolteachers, he grew up reading Russian literature. Besides, Ukraine and Russia have long shared a cultural space, and he wants Russians to read his work, to grasp how much hatred they have sown with their aggression in Ukraine.

“The most interesting fragments come from the least comfortable places, where the tensions and emotions run highest,” says Junior Sergeant Shandra, sitting on a park bench in Kyiv. He is briefly unsettled by the buzzing wheels of a passing cyclist because it reminds him of the hum of incoming drones – a sound so ubiquitous it torments civilians and soldiers alike.

Russia’s invasion has spawned a new generation of Ukrainian writers-turned-soldiers and soldiers-turned-writers who reconstruct the horrors of war in poetry and prose. Their voices, like Sgt. Shandra’s, are being amplified by Ukrainian publishing houses and promoters, who recognize people’s need to affirm their Ukrainian identity while making sense of the unfolding madness.

“People want to know what is happening in this war,” says Alla Lysenko, distribution manager at the Folio publishing house, which has tripled sales since the start of the war thanks to the surge of interest in Ukrainian historical nonfiction and Ukrainian-language books about the ongoing war. “They want to understand from firsthand, personal accounts, not just television.”

Dominique Soguel

Maj. Andrii Kirichenko signs copies of his books for the public during the Kyiv Book Fest.

No longer on the margins

At the Kyiv Book Fest, a handful of men in uniform bask in celebrity status during panel discussions and author keynotes. Maj. Andrii Kirichenko smiles behind one of the busiest sales stands as women snap up his latest titles, then line up for his autograph.

“Everything that I have witnessed and experienced taught me that I don’t have the right to forget,” he says in between selfies and readings. “I must pass this on to others. Every story, every poem is rooted in reality.”

Hanna Skoryna, a literary promoter, makes sure that military writers like Maj. Kirichenko are heard. She took a serious interest in Russia-Ukraine war literature in a bid to reconnect with her husband, a soldier who had been fighting since 2014. By 2017, the independent researcher had tracked 150 Ukrainian titles about the conflict, only 30 known to the broader public.

“These accounts used to be on the margins,” says Ms. Skoryna, who has documented 580 new titles since 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine. Eighty of the titles are by soldiers. “Now, every home, every publishing house has been touched by the war,” she says.

Dominique Soguel

Independent military literature researcher Hanna Skoryna, shown here at the Kyiv Book Fest, says soldiers have written about 80 books since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Iryna Bilotesrkovska of the Squirrel-Bilka publishing house keeps the printing presses running in Kyiv despite regular blackouts. “People react differently to stressful events,” she points out. “Some don’t want to know anything at all. Others want to know everything; they are are brave and strong because they volunteer to let the war into their lives, into their homes, and into their heads.”

The inevitable common thread for Ukrainian writers of all stripes now is war – one that has grown in scale and intensity. “In the 15 minutes I was at a position, say, near Bakhmut, the number of mines, artillery, or tank shells fired by the Russians was much higher than in the 10 months I spent on the front lines in 2015,” writes Artem Chekh, a soldier and author of 16 books, in an online written conversation with The Christian Science Monitor.

“I am more interested in who will be left behind,” he adds. “Who will speak when the guns fall silent? Whose voices will continue to be heard? Because war gives rise to many meanings in literature, but will these writers be able to keep from losing themselves as writers? Is it not because of their naked nerves that they have the power of their words and thus become famous?”

The giant of war

Poetry appears to be a popular format for soldier-writers. Quick snatches that pack a punch are compatible with active duty. “Poetry is an important medium in wartime because of its short format,” says Pfc. Yaryna Chornohuz, a combat medic and poet who also writes prose. “It shows how we can all feel the same but from different points of view.”

Mr. Shandra dedicated his collection of poetry, “Solid Black,” to a fallen brother-in-arms he befriended in the early days of the war. It draws inspiration from the uncomfortable marriage of beauty and pain, using the titular color as a theme. “It is the blackness of your fear and despair; it is the blackness of the soil you are hiding in. It is the blackness of the night you operate in,” he explains.

Private Chornohuz likens war to a giant that makes everybody feel small and at the mercy of uncontrollable events. “When you are a soldier, you feel this,” she says while visiting her daughter in Kyiv between deployments. “You do a small job, you feel small. And the same thing happens to civilians under rocket attacks. You feel very small.”

Dominique Soguel

Ukrainian poet and military medic Yaryna Chornohuz has served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2019.

Sofia Cheliak of the Lviv Book Forum, another book festival, knows about that. On Sept. 4, a Russian missile strike killed seven people in the center of Lviv in western Ukraine. Sitting on the terrace of a café just hours later, she reflects on the violence. “Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, everything is happening to you, with different degrees of intensity,” she says.

“Everything is horrible, horrible, and you can’t find language to explain this,” she adds, pondering the bonds that bind war-battered creatives. “You stop believing in God, in literature, in art for art.”

Her mind inevitably turns to her friend, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian author killed last year in a Russian missile strike on a pizza place in Kramatorsk. In an introduction to the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was tortured and killed by Russian soldiers in 2022, she had referred to the generation of Ukrainian writers in the 1920s and 1930s who were killed during the Stalinist purges in Ukraine.

The memory of those victims looms large in the collective creative consciousness taking shape now. “I am in the midst of the new ‘Executed Renaissance,’” Ms. Amelina had written.

“Literature is a way to share the love”

But lives cut short and interrupted projects have not been enough to stop Ukrainian culture from reasserting itself.

The full-scale invasion has spawned not just poetry, but also a huge amount of nonfiction writing, says Ms. Cheliak. Books range from occupation diaries, to memoirs by those who have suffered loss, to accounts by prisoners of war. And, of course, many writers have joined the army, while some soldiers have discovered writing at the front.

“Being on the front line, it is easy to lose your humanity because you can see really horrible things that make you dead inside,” she notes. “But literature is a way to share the love and keep something good in you alive.”

Like the need to fight, Ukrainians say, the act of writing is, today, an existential requirement.

“All throughout history, Russia told us that we are one nation, that we are nothing special,” says Ms. Bilotesrkovska. “Russia has tried to take our voice, to take our culture and appropriate all that we have and present it as theirs. But it is not. Right now, we are on our way to finding our own identity and our own voice.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting of this article.

“I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here” is one of the most famous first lines in Mexican literature. It comes from the 1955 novel “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo, an author who inspired Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Now, the influential book has been adapted into a movie of the same name, which begins streaming on Netflix Nov. 6.

The character who voices those words is Juan Preciado, a man who travels to his late mother’s hometown to carry out a promise to find his father, Pedro Páramo, and claim from him the money and land that Juan is owed.

The book itself is relatively short at 150 pages. As the plot weaves between the living and the dead, the real and the unreal, it becomes “a novel that defies comprehension, with confusion and fragmentation becoming central to Rulfo’s unstable fictional world,” wrote Douglas Weatherford, who translated a new English edition of the book last year, in an afterword.

It’s that sense of confusion that director Rodrigo Prieto felt most challenged – and inspired – to preserve in his Netflix adaptation. “You can’t film the novel directly,” he has said, because it isn’t linear, and it combines the present with the past, where the living are the ones who disturb the dead. “The main challenge was to maintain the structural sense of Rulfo’s work.”

The bulk of the story is set during the Mexican Revolution, but the story is relevant today, says Emilio Sauri, associate professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“Pedro Páramo’s story is one about what happens in a world where there’s a major concentration of wealth in the hands of one individual,” says Dr. Sauri. “What are the consequences of that? In the novel, it’s destruction, desolation, complete annihilation of a social world.”

Mr. Rulfo, who lived from 1917 to 1986, said in a 1977 television interview that “Pedro Páramo” was meant to be read several times before it could be truly understood. “I also had problems writing it,” he said. “It’s a difficult novel, but it was made that way intentionally. You need to read it three times to understand it.”

Juan Rosas/Netflix

A young Pedro Páramo and his love interest – and lifelong obsession – Susana San Juan are in a scene in Netflix’s "Pedro Páramo."

The Mexican author, whose only other book is a collection of short stories, “El Llano en llamas,” (“The Burning Plain”), is known for his painstaking attention to language, which he used to paint vivid imagery with bare-bones sentences. His work is considered the opening act for the Latin American literature boom in the second half of the 20th century.

Like many Mexicans, Jacobo Leder first read “Pedro Páramo” in high school. Today, he’s a college student studying international affairs in Mexico City. “It was truly a huge disappointment for me when I realized he’d only written two novels,” Mr. Leder says.

He considers Mr. Rulfo, whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages, to be Mexico’s best author. Mr. Leder remembers a classroom assignment for which he had to map key locations in the book’s fictional town of Comala, which is both deeply anchored in Mexico and yet universal in its themes of hope, power, and loss.

“In the book, it’s really vague where all the physical locations are. ... It’s almost as if Comala is immense, infinite,” the entire world, Mr. Leder says.

Nobel Prize-winning author Mr. García Márquez wrote in a foreword to the book that when he first arrived in Mexico City in 1961, in his early 30s and looking for inspiration, he hadn’t even heard of Mr. Rulfo. “I felt I still had many novels in me, but I couldn’t conceive of a convincing and poetic way of writing them.” A friend lent him a copy of “Pedro Páramo,” and “I couldn’t sleep until I had read it twice. ... The rest of that year I couldn’t read a single other author, because they all seemed inferior,” he wrote. “My profound exploration of Juan Rulfo’s work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing.” Mr. García Márquez’s next work? “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

There’s debate over whether Mr. Rulfo’s work should be categorized as magical realism, which incorporates elements of fantasy into otherwise real-world interactions. Are the dead speaking? Sure. Is there a multiplication of perspectives? Absolutely. But unlike in a lot of the genre’s classics, in “Pedro Páramo” there isn’t a strong juxtaposition between the real and the supernatural – it’s complete immersion.

Which is part of the reason the book can take some concentration.

Take for example a scene in which a woman named Damiana, who worked faithfully for Pedro Páramo despite how he oppressed so many people, comes to find Juan. She offers to take him to his father’s property. They walk together through an emptied-out town that she tells him “is full of echoes. It’s as if they were trapped in the gaps of the walls or beneath the cobblestones. As you walk, you feel someone following in your footsteps. You hear things rustling. Laughter. Old laughter, as if it were tired of laughing.”

She talks about hearing parties late at night, but when she comes down to see what is happening, the streets are deserted.

Juan asks her point-blank, “Are you alive, Damiana?”

The question goes unanswered.

In the movie adaptation, the uncertainty of this moment is underscored when Juan, who is following Damiana, pauses before rounding a corner after her.  As eerie music plays, he encounters only an empty, moonlit, cobblestone road. A dog barks in the distance, and Juan’s own voice reverberates as he calls out her name. Is his echo one of the sounds she’d been referring to?

Since Mr. Rulfo is cited as a key inspiration for contemporary Mexican novelists, why doesn’t he have the name recognition of other big Latin American writers? One reason could be that he wasn’t as prolific as his contemporaries, who are better known outside the region, says Dr. Sauri. 

And perhaps because of timing. Regional authors like Colombia’s Mr. García Márquez, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, and Chile’s Isabel Allende “were finding the pathways to a broader audience outside the Spanish-speaking world. And Rulfo came right before that,” Dr. Sauri says. 

Mr. Leder, the college student, worries about whether the Netflix film will do the story justice. “I’ll watch the movie for nothing more than the fact that I think ‘Pedro Páramo’ is an incredible story,” he says. “Have I considered that I might like the movie more than the book? Definitely not.

“It’s unbeatable.”

AP

Migrants disembark from an Italian naval ship in Shengjin, Albania, Nov. 8, after being intercepted in international waters.

Europe’s novel set of solutions to deal with waves of migrants arriving without papers may now pivot on a handful of individual cases in Italy. On Monday, a court in Rome ruled that seven asylum-seekers held in an Italian-run detention center in the nearby country of Albania must be brought to Italy. That follows a similar ruling last month involving 12 other migrants detained under similar circumstances.

The two cases go to the crux of a problem affecting two parallel approaches to managing the influx of people seeking access to Europe without authorization. One rests on European countries processing asylum applications outside the boundaries of the European Union prior to arrival. The other depends on third countries detaining migrants and vetting their applications.

Both approaches have required striking a balance between the rule of law and compassion both for the migrants and for the countries where they seek to resettle. European law forbids detaining migrants in or returning them to points of origin that pose a risk to their well-being. The tricky part is determining whether countries are safe.

In Italy, the judges have asked the Court of Justice of the EU for clarity. A year ago, Italy signed a deal with Albania to build two facilities to house asylum-seekers while it considers their applications. The 19 migrants ordered to be sent to Italy were from either Bangladesh or Egypt – two of 19 countries on Rome’s list of places it deems safe.

But by what measure? That was the question the judges in the first case asked. The judges argued that Germany under the Nazis was “an extremely safe country” that provided “an enviable level of security” to the majority of its citizens.

Determining and guaranteeing safety for migrants may be even more difficult for European countries attempting the second approach. Illegal migration into Europe has fallen in the past year and stands at a fraction of the yearly influx a decade ago. Yet the rise of right-wing populist movements has given new currency to the idea of essentially offshoring the problem altogether.

The Netherlands is exploring a plan to send unprocessed migrants to Uganda. Germany has lately expressed interest in pursuing a similar arrangement with Rwanda – even though the same idea helped topple a government in Britain in July. (U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to bring back his “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers.)

Meanwhile, both the British government and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, have lately embraced Italy’s approach.

For now, judges in Europe seem to be influencing the direction of the EU’s migrant policies. Yet, wrote Charlotte Slente, secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council, in the news site EUobserver, “We must unite behind our shared commitments and work in lockstep to uphold our moral and legal duties to those in need.”

“Upholding our asylum obligations and border management are not mutually exclusive. Both are essential to the integrity, and soul, of not just the European project, but the humanity that unites us all.”