Summit meetings on the fringes of funerals, diplomacy after death as the British political scientist Geoff Berridge put it, have a long and useful tradition. Not only can such working funerals force a meeting at a time that would not otherwise have happened, but they can remind those assembled of the transience of life, physical as well as political, and the urgency of now.
And so it was with the funeral of Senator Lyndsey Graham at Washington National Cathedral. The marking of his death provided the background to carefully choreographed visits to the White House for Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
