The Old Right journalist Garet Garrett, writing in 1952, understood that empires do not arrive with heralds. They come instead through "quiet aggrandizements of power," accretions so gradual and so dressed in the language of necessity that the citizen scarcely notices the republic he was born into has become something else. The first requisite of empire, Garrett wrote, is that "the executive power of government shall be dominant." He was tracing the long constitutional erosion by which the war-making prerogative—the power the Framers most deliberately withheld from any single man—migrated to...

Bombs have been falling on Iran for fifty-nine days. As of now a ceasefire is holding, just barely, brokered under pressure from Pakistan. But before it came, a girls' primary school in the southern city of Minab was hit on the first day of the war, at least 170 dead, most of them girls aged seven to twelve, killed by a U.S. Tomahawk missile that President Donald Trump initially denied firing. Thirty universities struck since February 28, including Iran's equivalent of MIT. Over 2,000 Iranians killed by American-Israeli strikes. Thirteen U.S. service members confirmed dead. An American F-15E...

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 country he cannot find on a map, on behalf of politicians who will not be going themselves. Across history, the most reliable solution to this problem has been God. Tell the soldier he is not serving the state—that cold, bureaucratic, manifestly self-interested entity—but rather serving the Almighty. Make the war a crusade. Make...