Former FBI director Robert Mueller died last week at the age of 81. The New York Times eulogized him as a “button-down, lockjawed, rock-ribbed exemplar of a vanishing caste.” In reality, Mueller was simply a twenty-first century version of J. Edgar Hoover, trampling...
The United States can conjure trillions of dollars from thin air through the magic of the Federal Reserve's printing press. What it cannot conjure into existence are the missiles, interceptors, and precision munitions that modern warfare devours at a pace Washington...
War is often sold to the public as an act of national will: decisive, necessary, and under control. The bill arrives later, in a quieter form. It shows up in insurance markets, shipping rates, emergency guarantees, higher fuel prices, and sudden policy reversals...
In 2008, a book appeared called Deleting the State: An Argument About Government. It was a trim volume, barely a hundred pages of actual text, but it hit me with the force of a hundred pounds from the very first page. As an undergraduate political science student, I...
Over the last week, the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States has played out in a second theater that never sleeps: the timeline of X/Twitter. The feed is saturated with claims about battlefield damage, casualty numbers, “secret” losses, and the health or...
Not distracted by the war on Iran, on March 3, President Donald Trump, once again, warned that Cuba was in its “last moments.” The next day, he said, “It may be a friendly takeover. It may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter because they are down to, as...
Governments that want to send young people to die in distant countries have always faced the same problem: the arithmetic of the transaction is unfavorable. You are asking a twenty-three-year-old to trade his life for a geopolitical objective he cannot see, in a...
“Maybe I had a brain tumor.” That was NBC News anchorman Brian Williams in 2015 desperately fishing for an explanation when his ever-evolving fantasy claims on national television about his combat experience in the Iraq War were finally exposed. But it wasn’t a brain...
