In one sense, the border crisis between Poland and Belarus is a tit-for-tat geopolitical conflict in which refugees and migrants just happen to be the weapons. Belarus, in May, forced down a civilian airliner to arrest a dissident on board. The European Union, as punishment, imposed economic sanctions on Belarus. Now, in apparent retaliation, Belarus is granting visas to thousands of Middle Easterners and driving them to the borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, all E.U. member states. Those countries must then either process them — or allow them to freeze at the border, which has so far been their preference. Geopolitical conflict is the framing that many E.U. officials are going with. “This is a war in which civilians and media messages are the ammunition,” Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said in a statement . But in another sense, this is just the latest iteration of a yearslong […]