@trenthead

Why efforts to curb the cruelty of military force may have backfired.

In Arkin’s view, the covid-19 pandemic brought the 9/11 era to an end: two decades of misdirected resources bookended by displays of official incompetence. Arkin argues that the time is overdue to pull back—to close some of our overseas bases and bring home many of the troops. Biden’s decision on Afghanistan can be seen as an attempt to temper some of America’s commitments. What lies ahead, as the chaos engulfing Afghanistan suggests, may not be that peaceful era of political freedom and pluralism which Moyn thinks our militarism blocked, and indeed Moyn’s singular focus on American power may come to seem strikingly insular. We’ve spent decades fighting asymmetrical wars, but now there’s a symmetrical one looming. The United States has never faced an adversary of China’s power: China’s G.D.P. is, by some measures, greater than ours, its active-duty military is larger than ours, and its weapon systems are rapidly expanding. China appears determined to challenge the status quo, not just the territorial one but the scaffolding of international laws that govern much of the world’s diplomatic and economic relations. If two forever wars are finally coming to an end, a new Cold War may await. ♦

More than 70 years after World War II, we're still learning about new facets of the Holocaust.

Peter Duffy, author of the 2003 book “The Bielski Brothers,” lamented the lack of a unified collection of these testimonies in a conversation with me recently. “There’s this sense that we’ve done enough on this history. People say, ‘Oh, another Holocaust book, or another memorial,’” he told me. But Mr. Duffy believes that when it comes to what transpired in these forests, “we’ve barely scratched the surface of the story that is there, and probably most of it is lost.” The history is so elusive, in fact, that scholars at The Polish Center for Holocaust Research have called these less-understood stories of Jews who escaped their ghettos and attempted to hide “the margins of the Holocaust.”

The Texas abortion law is the latest example of a harrowing trend.

But perhaps the most shocking thing about S.B. 8 is the power it gives abortion opponents — or simple opportunists — over their fellow citizens. The law is written so that they, not the police or prosecutors, get to enforce it, and potentially profit off it. Under S.B. 8, any private citizen can sue others for “conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.”

John Pierce has been a combative advocate for those accused of participating in the Jan. 6 attack, but he’s missed court appearances for a week.

“I’m like Gerard Butler in ‘300,’” Mr. Pierce said in an interview before dropping out of sight, comparing himself to the action star who played a Spartan king. “I’m in the hot gates at Thermopylae, holding the pass against the million-man Persian army.”