Greetings from Armenia, where my friends and I have come for what is turning into a quadrennial foreign get-together. Eight years ago we visited Ghana and Togo, and Kyrgyzstan four years after that. The rules of our overseas trips are simple. We cannot visit anywhere that we might have chosen as a family holiday, and we will not go anywhere where there is an unacceptable risk of getting arrested or killed. With these two rules, a startling amount of the globe seems to disappear as an option. So here we are.

For those who haven’t been, Armenia is a glorious place, vaguely European yet distinctly not. We arrived in Yerevan, its capital, a thriving modern city spread out across the rolling hills of a valley, shadowed by Mount Ararat. The mountain dominates the horizon from just across the border in modern Turkey – a cruel geological reminder of Armenia’s Ottoman tragedy.…