The United Arab Emirates spent eight years and a fortune trying to own a stretch of water. It bought proxies, seized islands, built runways and naval bases along both banks of the Bab el-Mandeb, and sold the whole program to Washington as the wall that would keep Iran out of the Red Sea. In September the wall fell, and the water passed to Iran's closest ally. The chokepoint that a decade of state planning was meant to secure is now held by the Houthis, allied with Tehran. There is no cleaner illustration of what happens when a government sets out to engineer a region from above. The scheme...

On the evening of August 4, an airport employee at Leipzig/Halle noticed a small drone resting on the apron near a parked Ukrainian Antonov freighter. It carried an explosive charge and a detonator. The charge did not go off. A bomb-disposal robot rolled out across the tarmac, and by the account German officials would later give, the device had gone unnoticed for roughly four hours before anyone found it. Then the airport reopened and the country moved on. Twenty-eight days later, on September 1, the German government told its citizens who had done it. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt...

A photograph moved across the Western wires with a caption in capital letters. "COUNTER US POWER," it read, above an image of the Kyrgyzstan president walking China's Xi Jinping past an honor guard in Bishkek, when they met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SOC) summit that took place from August 31 to September 1, 2026. The two men were not photographed doing anything to the United States. They were walking to lunch. The caption supplied the enemy, the verb, and the stakes, because the summit itself supplied none of them, and a Western audience cannot be shown a room of Asian and...

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...