The Ecuadorian Embassy in London is situated at the end of a wide brick lane, next to the Harrods department store, in Knightsbridge. Sometimes plainclothes police officers, or vans with tinted windows, can be found outside the building. Sometimes there are throngs of people around it. Sometimes there is virtually no one, which was the case in June, 2012, when Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, arrived, disguised as a motorcycle courier, to seek political asylum. In the five years since then, he has not set foot beyond the Embassy. Nonetheless, he has become a global influence, proving that with simple digital tools a single person can craft a new kind of power—a distributed, transnational power, which functions outside norms of state sovereignty that have held for centuries. Encouraged by millions of supporters, Assange has interfered with the world’s largest institutions. His releases have helped fuel democratic uprisings—notably in Tunisia, where a revolution sparked the Arab Spring—and they have been submitted as evidence in human-rights cases around the world. At the same time, Assange’s methodology and his motivations have increasingly come under suspicion. During the Presidential election last year, he published tens of thousands of hacked e-mails written by Democratic operatives, releasing them at pivotal moments in the campaign. They provoked strikingly disparate receptions. “I love WikiLeaks,” Donald Trump declared, in exultant gratitude. After the election, Hillary Clinton argued that the releases had been instrumental in keeping her from the Oval Office.

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When Donald Trump became president, he touted his plans to make many previously unthinkable deals—including the most elusive one of all, between Israel and the Palestinians. “There’s no reason there’s not peace between” them, he insisted this spring. “None whatsoever.”

A few months later, the deal looks more predictably distant, and these days White House officials resort to anonymity to speak of “productive” meetings and plans to “continue our steady engagement.” Few of those who closely follow the issue think peace—or even a serious new round of negotiations—is at hand.

Which may help explain why Oslo, a three-hour, serious-minded play about a few months back in 1993 when Middle East peace finally seemed to be within reach, is the unlikely Broadway hit of 2017, a critical success that just won this year’s Tony Award for best play and is soon to be made into a movie. Call it wish fulfillment, or a belated recognition of what could have been—especially at a moment when the Oslo dream of a permanent two-state solution is, if not dead, at best on permanent life support.

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