Recent Articles

There is a particular kind of incompetence that announces itself as strength. It arrives not with hesitation but with volume, not with strategy but with spectacle.

They called it Operation Epic Fury, which is to say, they named it the way empires name their violence—with the breathless grandiosity of men who confuse destruction with destiny.

The Politics of Distraction and the Epstein scandal individualize corruption, creating a spectacle that redirects anger away from structural power. Something has shifted in the architecture of American power, and the Epstein scandal—or rather, what has been made of it—offers a revealing aperture into the nature of that shift.

Few spectacles in democratic life are quite so revealing as a leader who, sensing the ground shift beneath him, resolves not to look down. President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening—one hour and forty-eight minutes of it, the longest in modern American history—was such a performance: a marathon of assertion delivered into the teeth of accumulating evidence that very little of what was being asserted bore much resemblance to the country people are actually living in.

There is, in the choreography of diplomacy, a gesture so fundamental that even the most negligent student of foreign affairs would recognize it as inviolable: when a host government summons an ambassador, the ambassador appears. It is not a suggestion.

There are moments in the life of a nation when the architecture of power, so long mistaken for permanence, reveals itself as provisional—a scaffolding of assumptions that the wind of consequence can loosen and scatter.

There is a particular kind of institution that exists not to accomplish its stated purpose but to announce that the purpose has already been accomplished. You recognise it by its ceremony—the signing, the podium, the charter held aloft like a diploma for a course no one has taken.

There is a particular quality to the diplomacy of our age that would have troubled the old seekers of wisdom—not its brutality, for power has always been brutal, but its peculiar emptiness, its capacity to perform the gestures of statesmanship while hollowing out every principle that once gave those gestures meaning.