In a speech delivered in the autumn of 2002, as the United States moved inexorably toward war with Iraq, the late Joan Didion delivered an offhand remark that effectively summed up the flaw at the heart of the logic behind that coming war, and of the logic of a number of wars before it, and of a number of wars to come. Referring to “the ‘war on terror’ that the President had declared” of which the operation against Iraq was the centerpiece, Didion added a parenthetical critique: “...as if terror were a state and not a technique.” Twenty-three and a half years later, we live in the detritus...

During the late nineteenth century, under the aegis of a colonial order supervised by the French and British and German Empires, the constitutional monarch of Belgium, a tiny country in Europe, created an imitation empire that became the world’s evilest regime. In 1876, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, a grandson of the last King of France and a cousin of both Queen Victoria and the German-born Prince Albert, founded the International African Association for humanitarian improvement of the “dark continent.” Three years later, in 1879, the Association sponsored Henry Stanley, who had...

On January 22, 2026—367 days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration and 352 days after his announcement of a plan for America to “Raze and Rebuild Gaza” and the day he launched his “Board of Peace” to “oversee” Gaza—Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took the stage at the World Economic Forum at Davos to explain how “Raze and Rebuild” worked in practice. A video of this speech shows Kushner, on a podium to the left of the members of the Board of Peace including Trump, speaking as is his wont at a rapid gait and appearing almost boyishly earnest. A Power Point to Kushner’s right showed “a...