America and the Cost of Abandoning Allies

 

Kurds in Iraq, Turkey and Syria have been 

staunch allies of the US and then we abandon them

Wars rarely begin where we think they do. They begin years earlier—in promises made, in warnings ignored, and in allies encouraged to stand up only to discover they are standing alone.

As the war with Iran unfolds, my hope—however thin—is that it may finally begin to correct a troubling pattern in American foreign policy. For decades the United States has urged allies and partners to take risks alongside us, only to hesitate when confronting the regimes that threaten them.

Again and again the result has been the same: unfinished confrontations and abandoned partners.

Since 1979 Iran’s revolutionary government has funded militant groups across the Middle East and beyond. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis operate with Iranian support. For more than three decades Tehran has pursued nuclear capability while destabilizing the region through proxy warfare. For much of that time the world has largely tolerated these actions.

But Iran is only part of a larger pattern.

In 1991, at the end of the First Gulf War, the United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Kurdish forces in the north and Shiite rebels in the south answered that call. When Saddam’s regime retaliated with overwhelming force, the United States chose not to intervene. The result was catastrophic. Tens of thousands were killed and more than a million Kurds fled toward the Turkish border in one of the largest refugee crises of the war’s aftermath.

Three years later, in 1994, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an extraordinary act of trust. Yet when Russia seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, the response from the West was limited and cautious. The guarantees proved weaker than the promises.

During the Iraq War, beginning in 2003, American forces faced devastating roadside bombs and shaped-charge explosives capable of penetrating armored vehicles. Many of these weapons were traced to Iranian supply networks. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed by devices that crossed the Iraqi border from Iran, yet the United States never directly confronted the Iranian government responsible for enabling those attacks.

When I served in Iraq in 2009 with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, we flew troops to the Iran-Iraq border who were stopping smuggling where they could, but there was no retaliation against Iran.

The pattern repeated itself again during the war against ISIS. Beginning in 2015, Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria became some of the most effective partners the United States had on the ground. They fought and died alongside American forces to dismantle the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate. But in 2018 the United States withdrew support from Kurdish positions in northern Syria, leaving them exposed to Turkish military operations.

The pattern appeared again in Afghanistan. For two decades, beginning in 2001, Afghan soldiers, interpreters, and local allies worked alongside American forces against the Taliban. Thousands died fighting a common enemy. Yet when the United States withdrew in 2021, the Afghan government collapsed with stunning speed. Many Afghans who had worked closely with American forces were left scrambling to escape Taliban reprisals. Some were evacuated in dramatic scenes at Kabul’s airport, but many others were left behind. For those who had trusted American promises, the end of the war felt was abandonment.

Once again, allies who had taken risks alongside the United States were left vulnerable.

Meanwhile Iran has strengthened its partnership with Russia, supplying drones that have been used extensively against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Those weapons have become one of the clearest links between Tehran’s regional ambitions and Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

If the facilities producing those drones have now been destroyed, it would represent more than a tactical success. It would be one small step toward confronting a network of aggression that stretches from Tehran to Moscow.

None of this means war should ever be welcomed lightly. Those of us who have served in the Middle East know too well the cost, uncertainty, and unintended consequences that follow military conflict.

But history also teaches the cost of hesitation.

When aggressors believe the West will protest but not act, they push further.

If this conflict weakens Iran’s ability to fund terror, slows Russia’s war against Ukraine, and gives the people of Iran even a small opening against their oppressive regime, it may begin to repair a long record of half-measures and abandoned allies.

That hope may be thin.

But after decades of watching aggressors test the limits of Western resolve, it is still worth holding.

Sparks and Photons: Two Visions of an Electrical World

 

Two very different books — Daniel Keown’s The Spark in the Machine and Richard Feynman’s QED — begin from the same fascinating premise: everything is electric.

In QED, Feynman strips physics to its bones. The world, he argues, is built from the interactions of charged particles exchanging photons. Light is not mystical illumination; it is an electromagnetic messenger. Electrons repel and attract by trading quanta of energy. The solidity of matter, the chemistry of life, the warmth of the sun — all reduce to patterns of charge and exchange. Feynman’s genius is not just in explaining quantum electrodynamics, but in making it feel...solid. Redwood trees, rail cars, rhinoceroses, refrigerators, rainforests--they are all mostly empty space filled with colliding, transforming particles--look deep enough and you find electrical interaction.

Keown, approaching from a different direction, proposes that traditional Chinese acupuncture maps onto bioelectric circuitry within the human body. He argues that meridians correspond to fascial planes and conductive pathways, and that health depends on electrical coherence. Where Feynman speaks of photons and amplitudes, Keown speaks of voltage gradients and tissue conductivity. But both imagine the body not as a hydraulic system, but as a dynamic electrical field.

The commonality is not proof; it is perspective.

Both authors reject the purely mechanical metaphor of the body and the universe. In Feynman’s account, what appears solid is mostly empty space structured by electromagnetic force. In Keown’s account, what appears anatomical is animated by charge distribution and electrical signaling. The difference lies in rigor and scope. Feynman’s work rests on experimentally verified mathematics that predicts results to extraordinary precision. Keown’s framework is more interpretive, attempting to reconcile ancient medical practice with modern bioelectric research.

Yet the philosophical overlap is striking. Both books challenge the naive intuition that matter is inert. Instead, they suggest that structure arises from invisible interaction. Energy precedes form. Pattern precedes substance.

The divergence is equally important. Feynman is relentlessly empirical. His photons either match experiment or they don’t. Keown operates at the frontier between hypothesis and demonstration, where metaphor risks outrunning measurement. That tension does not invalidate the comparison; it sharpens it.

If QED teaches that the universe is electrical at its deepest level, The Spark in the Machine asks whether that same principle scales into biology in ways medicine has only begun to grasp. One book explains the microcosm of fundamental forces. The other speculates about the macrocosm of living systems.

They do not belong in the same category of certainty. But they do belong in the same intellectual conversation.

Both remind us that the world — and the body — may be less mechanical than we were taught, and more like a symphony of charge.

One represents the gold standard of physical theory. The other explores whether life’s complexity may also be grounded in electrical patterning. The books are inseparable in my mind, entwined and enmeshed in the complex reality I live in and hope to some degree to understand.

Geography Is Destiny — and Britain’s Fate Is Not What It Thinks

 

In Geography Is Destiny, historian Ian Morris returns to familiar ground for readers of Why the West Rules, for Now and War!: the long arc of history shaped not primarily by ideology or individual genius, but by geography. This time his focus narrows to Britain. The result is a sweeping, 8,000-year meditation on how the island has defined itself — and misdefined itself — in relation to Europe and the wider world.

Morris argues that Britain’s story is not one of simple insularity or simple Europeanism. It is both. Over millennia, geography made Britain part of Europe and separate from it at the same time. The English Channel is neither a moat nor a wall; it is a filter. Britain’s physical separation fostered political distinctiveness, but its proximity guaranteed entanglement. Morris invokes “Thatcher’s Law” repeatedly: Britain is part of Europe, like it or not. The island may resist Brussels, resent regulations, or vote for Brexit, but geography remains stubborn.

When Morris finished the book in 2021, Brexit was five years old. He reminds readers that Britain has “left Europe” before — politically, strategically, psychologically — only to return when reality intruded. The deeper argument is that Britain’s oscillation between European integration and distance is structural, not temporary. Brexit, in this telling, is not a revolutionary break but another turn in a very long cycle.

The book also offers a clear-eyed assessment of Britain’s imperial rise and fall. Morris shows how geography first positioned Britain advantageously at the edge of Atlantic trade networks, then enabled it to build and project maritime power on a global scale. But the same geographic realities that helped create empire could not shield it from the industrialized slaughter of the two world wars. The financial and demographic costs of those conflicts broke the imperial model. Geography opened doors; geopolitics closed them.

What makes Geography Is Destiny particularly striking is its final turn. Morris argues that Brexit debates fundamentally miss the larger strategic picture. The real challenge to British sovereignty is not Brussels. It is Beijing. In his view, China — not the European Union — will define the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century. He sees China as the likely dominant power by the end of this century, reminding readers that the name “Middle Kingdom” reflects a civilizational self-understanding of centrality. China’s long history of technological and political dynamism, combined with its demographic weight, makes its rise less anomaly than reversion.

Reading the book now, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amid strains between America and NATO allies, Morris’s emphasis on structural forces feels even more prescient. Britain’s future will not be determined by symbolic acts of separation but by how it positions itself in a world where continental Europe, the United States, and a rising China compete and cooperate in shifting combinations.

What I admire most about Morris is his scale. He refuses to be trapped by headlines. He steps back — centuries back — and asks what geography makes likely. The result is not fatalism but clarity. Britain may debate identity endlessly. But islands do not move. And the larger tectonics of power are already shifting eastward.

This is Morris at his best: bold, unsettling, and deeply persuasive. I loved the book.

Suresnes American Cemetery and Memorial

 

Perched on the slopes of Mont Valérien just west of Paris, the Suresnes American Cemetery is the only American military cemetery from the First World War located  near the French capital. It holds the graves of more than 1,500 American service members, the vast majority of whom died in World War I. A smaller number of burials from World War II are also present, as well as the names of missing service members inscribed on the memorial walls.

The cemetery was established in 1917, while the war was still underway. As American Expeditionary Forces under General John J. Pershing entered the conflict, Suresnes was chosen as a burial site for soldiers who died in hospitals in and around Paris. Unlike the vast battlefield cemeteries in northeastern France—such as Meuse-Argonne or Aisne-Marne—Suresnes primarily became a resting place for those who succumbed to wounds or illness in rear-area medical facilities rather than those killed outright in combat.

When walking the rows of white marble headstones, one notices something striking: many dates of death fall not only in 1918 but also in January and February 1919—after the Armistice of November 11, 1918. The war had officially ended, yet American soldiers were still dying.

The reasons were both medical and epidemiological.

First, many of those late deaths were the result of wounds sustained in the final offensives of 1918. The Meuse-Argonne campaign, which began in late September and continued until the Armistice, was the largest operation in American military history up to that point. It was also extraordinarily costly. Soldiers gravely wounded in October and early November often lingered in hospitals for weeks or months before succumbing to infections, organ failure, or complications that modern medicine might treat more effectively today. Antibiotics did not yet exist. Even survivable injuries by today’s standards could become fatal in 1918.

Two Jewish soldiers, both named Harry, died after the First World War ended.

Second—and equally significant—was the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, commonly known as the Spanish flu. The virus tore through military camps and transport ships with devastating speed. American forces in France were not spared. Crowded barracks, troop movements, and weakened immune systems made soldiers particularly vulnerable. Influenza frequently developed into pneumonia, which at the time had limited treatment options. Thousands of American troops died of influenza-related illness both during and after active combat operations.

In many cases, it is impossible to attribute late 1918 and early 1919 deaths exclusively to one cause. Some wounded soldiers, already weakened by injury, contracted influenza in hospitals. Others survived combat entirely but fell victim to disease before they could return home. The war may have ended, but the biological aftermath did not respect the Armistice.

After the war, families were given the option to repatriate remains to the United States or to leave their loved ones buried overseas. Those interred at Suresnes remain as part of the permanent American presence in France—a reminder that America’s entry into the Great War came late but at real cost.

The cemetery’s quiet hillside setting, overlooking Paris in the distance, contrasts sharply with the violence that brought these young men there. The rows are orderly, serene. Yet the dates on the stones tell a harsher truth: wars do not always end when the guns fall silent. For many buried at Suresnes, the fighting stopped in November 1918. The dying did not.

Why I Am No Longer a Democrat

 

Torch carrying Nazis at the Unite the Right Rally

In 2017, torch-carrying neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.” It was open, unapologetic antisemitism. No decoding required.

Protesters in NYC chanting "We support Hamas here."

Recently, protesters have stood outside American synagogues chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and “We support Hamas here.” Different slogans. Different political tribe. Same moral rot.

Which is worse?

Neither. Both.

Both are expressions of political extremism that normalize hostility toward Jews. Both use intimidation. Both test whether the broader political movements around them have the courage to draw lines.

When Charlottesville happened, mainstream conservatives were forced to confront the ugliness on their fringe. Many failed. Some succeeded. But the hatred was unmistakable and widely condemned.

What I have watched in recent months unsettled me more deeply: the hesitation — and in some quarters the open tolerance — within segments of the progressive left when antisemitic rhetoric shows up wrapped in activist language.

If you chant outside a synagogue in America and echo slogans of a terrorist organization whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, you don’t get to hide behind moral nuance. That’s intimidation. That's hate. Period.

The final break for me wasn’t just about Gaza. It was about selective outrage.

We are told constantly that Gaza is a genocide. That word is used with moral thunder. But where is the sustained outrage over Iran’s repression of its own people? Where is the relentless campus mobilization over Kurdish persecution? Over Boko Haram’s violence? Over the industrial-scale destruction of Ukraine by Russia?

When human-rights language becomes selective — deployed ferociously in one case and cautiously in others — it stops looking universal. It's tribal.

Civilian suffering in Gaza is tragic. So is civilian suffering in Tehran. So is civilian suffering in Kyiv. If you want to invoke genocide, liberation, colonialism, or resistance, then apply those principles consistently.

Instead, in too many progressive spaces, denunciations of Israel have become a loyalty test. In some local Democratic politics, candidates are pressured to declare Israel guilty of genocide or face political exile. That isn’t debate. That’s hate.

And yes — I know the rebuttal. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitism. Of course it isn’t. Governments are not immune from criticism.

But when protests target synagogues instead of embassies, when chants mirror the language of groups committed to Jewish eradication, and when Jewish students are told they must renounce Zionism to feel safe on campus, something has gone very wrong.

That is why I left the Democratic Party.

Not because I drifted right. Not because I have forgotten January 6th. Not because I am blind to extremism on the Republican side.

I left because I refuse to belong to a coalition that cannot decisively confront antisemitism when it appears inside its own ranks.

At the same time, I am not a Republican. The nationalist right has its own flirtations with illiberalism, its own conspiracies, its own moral evasions.

Which leaves me politically homeless.

The greatest threats to global stability today are militant Islamist extremism and Vladimir Putin’s effort to rebuild Russian imperial power. Any movement that clearly and consistently opposes both — without apologies, without selective outrage — would have my loyalty.

Until then, I will stand outside party lines.

I will support Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

I will support the people of Iran fighting a regime that brutalizes them.

I will oppose antisemitism whether it wears a swastika or waves a Hamas flag.

I do not belong to either party.

I belong to consistency in fighting hate.

Musée Marmottan Monet: History, Collection, and Serene Beauty

 Tucked away in Paris's 16th arrondissement, the Musée Marmottan Monet is one of city's quietly beautiful museums. It lacks the crowds and theatricality of the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, but what it offers instead is intimacy—an experience that feels less like visiting a museum than like being welcomed into the private world of Impressionism.

The museum began not as a shrine to Monet, but as the private residence of Paul Marmottan, a late-19th-century historian and collector with a passion for the Napoleonic era. His home housed an exceptional collection of First Empire furniture, paintings, and decorative arts. When Marmottan died in 1932, he bequeathed the house and his collections to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, transforming it into a museum. Over time, however, its identity shifted dramatically—thanks to a series of transformative donations.

The most important of these came from Michel Monet, Claude Monet’s younger son. In 1966, he donated his father’s personal collection to the museum, instantly making the Marmottan the world’s leading repository of Monet’s work. This gift included paintings Monet had kept for himself—works never intended for sale or exhibition. Among them is Impression, soleil levant, the painting that gave Impressionism its name and that now anchors the museum’s identity.

Nowhere is Monet’s presence more deeply felt than on the lower floor, where the late Nymphéas—the water lilies—are displayed. These paintings are immersive rather than declarative. Hung low and spread across walls, they invite prolonged looking rather than quick recognition. Here, Monet’s obsession with light, reflection, and time unfolds in endless variation: lilies dissolving into color, water becoming sky, form hovering at the edge of abstraction. Sitting before them, I felt one senses not spectacle but persistence—the result of decades of seeing and re-seeing the same pond as vision itself aged and changed.

Upstairs, the museum opens into a different but equally compelling chapter of Impressionism through its exceptional holdings of Berthe Morisot. Thanks largely to donations from Morisot’s descendants, the Marmottan houses the most important collection of her work anywhere. These paintings—intimate, luminous, and psychologically acute—offer a corrective to the old narrative that cast Morisot as a “minor” Impressionist. Her portraits and domestic scenes reveal an artist of extraordinary subtlety, capturing the textures of women’s lives with brushwork that is as daring as Monet’s but more inward in tone.

What makes the Musée Marmottan Monet so affecting is precisely this balance. It is not a museum of manifestos or movements, but of sustained attention. Monet’s water lilies reward stillness. Morisot’s paintings reward empathy. 

The Napoleonic rooms remind visitors of the museum’s origins as a private home, grounding the experience in lived space rather than monumental display.

Leaving the Marmottan, I was not overwhelmed. I felt peaceful, immersed in the soft landscapes that Monet and Morisot gave me. It is a museum built for lingering. I sat for a long time amid the water lilies letting myself be transported to Givenchy. 

The Unnecessary Alliance: Barbarossa Unleashed and the Moral Cost of Victory

 

In Barbarossa Unleashed, Craig Luther makes an unsettling argument: the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was doomed not because of heroic Soviet resistance or Allied assistance, but because the German army was structurally and logistically incapable of winning the war it began. Page after page, Luther piles on data—numbers of tanks, calibers of guns, fuel consumption rates, rail gauges, truck shortages, ammunition stocks, winter clothing shortfalls—until a grim picture emerges. The Wehrmacht did not merely underestimate the Soviet Union; it lacked the material capacity to defeat it. Germany invaded too far, too fast, with too little.

Luther is relentless. Rather than focusing on battlefield drama or individual commanders, he dissects the war as an industrial and logistical contest. The best German tanks often outperformed Soviet models tactically, but they broke down at catastrophic rates. The bulk of the 3,500 German tanks in the invasion force were no match for the Soviet T-34 entering the fight at a rate of hundreds per month. 

German supply lines stretched hundreds of miles over incompatible rail systems. Fuel shortages crippled mechanized units long before Soviet resistance did. Winter arrived not as an act of fate but as an entirely foreseeable consequence of German planning failures. The German army, Luther shows, was optimized for short campaigns against weaker opponents—not for a continental war against a state with vast manpower reserves and a deep industrial base.

From this analysis flows Luther’s most provocative conclusion: Germany could not have defeated the Soviet Union, even without Western aid. By December 1941, the campaign had already failed. Moscow had not fallen. Soviet industry had been relocated east of the Urals. German losses in men and matériel were irreplaceable. Whatever the later heroism of Soviet soldiers, the structural imbalance was decisive. Nazi defeat on the Eastern Front was not merely possible—it was inevitable.

That conclusion carries a deeply troubling implication. If Germany was doomed in the East regardless, then the wartime alliance between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union appears not only morally compromised, but strategically unnecessary. The United States and Britain allied themselves with a regime whose ideology, methods, and ambitions were fundamentally hostile to democratic values. Stalin’s Soviet Union was not a temporary partner of convenience that later “went bad.” It was a totalitarian empire before, during, and after the war.

Worse still, the price of that alliance was paid not by Americans or Britons, but by the peoples of Eastern Europe. Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and much of the Balkans were first crushed by Nazi occupation and then absorbed into Soviet domination. Allied concessions—formalized at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam—did not merely recognize military realities; they legitimized the enslavement of entire nations. The Western powers did not simply accept Soviet control; they helped sanctify it.

Defenders of the alliance argue that without Lend-Lease aid and strategic cooperation, the Soviet Union might have collapsed, prolonging the war or allowing Germany to consolidate its gains. Luther’s work challenges that assumption. Germany’s strategy depended on a lightning victory comparable to Poland or France. When that failed in 1941, the German war effort entered a slow-motion collapse. Even without American trucks or British matériel, the structural imbalance remained. The Wehrmacht could not replace its losses. The Red Army could—and did.

If this is true, then the moral calculus of the war changes uncomfortably. The Western Allies may have won the war faster by aiding Stalin—but at the cost of enabling a second empire to impose its will on Europe. The defeat of Nazi Germany was necessary and just. The method by which it was achieved is far harder to defend. One tyranny was destroyed; another was empowered.

This is not an argument for sympathy with Germany, nor a denial of Soviet suffering. It is an argument about choices. History often frames the wartime alliance as unavoidable. Barbarossa Unleashed suggests otherwise. The United States and Britain may have mistaken expediency for necessity, confusing the urgency of victory with the wisdom of alliance. In doing so, they secured peace in the West while abandoning the East.

Luther does not write polemic. He writes accounting—of fuel, steel, men, and vast distances. Yet the moral indictment emerges naturally from the numbers. By showing that Nazi defeat in the East was already baked in by the winter of 1941, Luther forces readers to confront an unsettling possibility: the Cold War may have begun not as an accident of victory, but as the predictable consequence of choices made when victory was already assured.

History rarely offers clean alternatives. But it does demand honesty. Barbarossa Unleashed strips away comforting myths and leaves behind a harder truth: the Allied victory over Nazi Germany came bundled with a second, avoidable tragedy—one whose victims had no seat at the negotiating table and no voice in the alliance that sealed their fate.

Without Allied aid, the Soviet Union would, according to Luther, have defeated the Nazis. But it is very possible they would have stopped at the Russian frontier and sued for a separate peace, much as Russian empire had done in 1917.  How different would the world have been with Poland, the Baltic states, and the Balkan states free from the time World War II ended.  

My heart aches as I read Barbarossa Unleashed wondering if Ukraine could have extracted itself from a weakened Soviet Union and be celebrating decades of democratic peace instead of fighting off Russian invaders.  

Niccolò Machiavelli, particularly in The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, advised that alliances should be treated with extreme caution, viewing them primarily as transactional, temporary, and often dangerous, rather than binding or based on friendship. 

His key warnings regarding alliances include:

Alliances are Inherently Fragile: Machiavelli warns that states break alliances based on self-interest. Because human nature is "fickle, false, and cowardly," allies will break their bonds whenever it suits their own advantage.

Avoid Dependence: A prince must never rely on others for their own safety or power. Relying too heavily on allies leads to a loss of sovereignty, where the state is "held" by another, creating a situation where, if the ally fails, you fall with them.

Jealousy and Envy: Even if an alliance is initially successful, allies can become jealous of your success and, driven by envy, may seek to destroy you.

"First Among Equals": If an alliance is necessary, Machiavelli advises that you should always ensure you are the stronger party (i.e., primus inter pares—first among equals) and that the alliance serves your own interests. 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

With reflections on Casey Cep’s introduction and Faulkner’s racial legacy

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like tumbling down a well into someone else’s madness—brilliant, disorienting, and claustrophobic. William Faulkner’s 1929 novel is widely considered a masterwork of literary modernism, and it earns that title with its shattered chronology, fractured voices, and poetic density. Faulkner demands that the reader abandon logic and surrender to rhythm, memory, and emotion. I admire the brilliance of what he accomplished. But as the father of two Black sons, I found reading this book almost unbearable.

My edition included a powerful introduction by New Yorker critic Casey Cep. She writes:

“Faulkner loved Mississippi in the way that only someone who has given his whole life to a place can love it—without irony, without detachment, and without apology. That love gives his novels their power and also their poison.”

That passage stayed with me more than anything in the novel itself. Because Faulkner’s love for Mississippi is everywhere in this book—not just its trees and rivers, but its hierarchies, its violence, its unspoken rules. He does not celebrate racism, but he lives inside it, unchallenged. The Black characters in The Sound and the Fury—Dilsey most of all—are relegated to the edges, mute supports for the crumbling white Compson family. Faulkner offers them no interiority, no freedom, no choice. And yet he mourns the Compsons like a tragic fall from grace.

What grace?

Faulkner once said, “If it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Later, he tried to walk that back, but the damage was done. That loyalty—to a world built on subjugation—makes it impossible for me to embrace him, no matter how intricate his prose or how inventive his narrative structure.

There are moments of undeniable power. Benjy’s disordered narration captures the chaos of loss with brutal immediacy. Quentin’s suicide unspools in a voice haunted by honor and failure. Jason, the bitter misogynist and racist, is Faulkner’s clearest indictment of the postbellum Southern man—mean, empty, desperate. And Dilsey, the Black servant, is portrayed with dignity, even if she is denied agency.

But dignity is not justice.

Reading Faulkner, I could never shake the feeling that I was inside a eulogy for a world I would never want my sons to live in. A world where their safety, their futures, and their very humanity would be conditional—if acknowledged at all.

I’m glad I read The Sound and the Fury. I understand why it is studied and revered. But Faulkner’s genius walks hand in hand with his blind spots. As Casey Cep notes, his love for Mississippi was both his strength and his undoing. For me, that’s too steep a price.

Brilliance, when rooted in a poisoned soil, can still grow thorns.

Twelve Windows into History: A Year of Reading History Books in 2025

 

In 2025, twelve of the fifty books I read were histories. Together they spanned continents, centuries, ideologies, and genres. Some were sweeping narratives of empires and revolutions, others intimate studies of lives, cities, and ideas. The authors ranged from Renaissance philosophers to contemporary journalists. Looking back on this collection now, I’m struck by both its variety and a quiet cohesion: these books are not just about the past, but about how societies contend with power, trauma, and the contested meanings of freedom.

Power and Its Discontents

John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics serves as a perfect starting point. It’s a clear-eyed survey of the evolution of economic thought and the ideological clashes that surround capitalism. Cassidy isn’t polemical; he’s analytical, tracing how thinkers from Keynes to Hayek shaped (and responded to) the 20th-century world. His book provides essential context for understanding how capitalist democracies weather crises, and how criticism from both the left and the right forms an inevitable—sometimes healthy—part of the system.

Cassidy’s exploration finds a natural companion in Civilization and Colossus, both by Niall Ferguson. In Civilization, Ferguson argues that the West’s dominance was no accident: it emerged from what he calls “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism, and work ethic. Colossus extends the conversation to American power specifically, casting the U.S. as an “empire in denial”—reluctant to assume the burdens of imperial responsibility, yet deeply embedded in global dominance. Taken together, Ferguson’s books present a provocative, often contrarian account of empire and modernization.

This theme—how power is structured, sustained, and eventually strained—runs through many of the books I read. Winston Churchill’s The Great Democracies, the final volume in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, revisits the rise of Britain and America with an unmistakable mid-20th-century tone of civilizational pride. Though his prose is magisterial, the world he writes about—the Anglo-American ascension—is already under siege by the time he sets his pen down.

War, Destruction, and the Edge of Civilization

Where Churchill evokes the glory of democratic power, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction is a quiet but devastating meditation on the moral toll of war. Focused on the Allied bombings of German cities during World War II, Sebald probes the silence in postwar German literature about civilian suffering. His prose, full of melancholic restraint, contrasts sharply with Ferguson’s triumphalism or Churchill’s rhetorical grandeur. If Ferguson describes the machinery of empire, Sebald offers a view from the ruins.

Sebastian Junger’s War and A Death in Belmont continue this investigation into conflict, though from very different vantage points. War is immersive and immediate—a journalistic account of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings of the post-9/11 era. Junger, embedded with the troops, captures not only combat but the paradoxical camaraderie that war breeds. In A Death in Belmont, he shifts to the domestic front, using a murder case from the 1960s to explore race, violence, and the lingering legacy of fear during the Boston Strangler era. The unspoken thread linking these two books is trauma—how it is felt, interpreted, and often mythologized.

William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid is another account of war—this time from the shadows. The biography of William Stephenson, the Canadian spymaster who ran British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere during WWII, reads like a spy thriller. But it also documents how information, disinformation, and covert alliances shaped the outcome of global war. It’s hard to read this without seeing the roots of today’s surveillance state.

Democracy, Dissent, and Collapse

Two books on this list—Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy—couldn’t be more different in tone, yet both are preoccupied with the fragility of republics. Murray critiques contemporary Western democracies for what he sees as cultural self-sabotage. His essays burn with polemical urgency, questioning whether liberal societies can survive their own internal contradictions. Machiavelli, writing five centuries earlier, is colder, more analytical. His Discourses praise the Roman Republic for its civic virtues, while warning that corruption, inertia, and factionalism inevitably bring down even the best regimes.

If Machiavelli diagnoses decline as a structural reality, Murray sees it as a moral collapse. Together, they ask hard questions about whether democracy is a stable end state or a fragile experiment that must be constantly renewed—and defended.

Lives in Context: Biography and Human Resilience

Several books focus less on systems and more on individuals. Dava Sobel’s The Elements of Marie Curie offers a lucid, engaging portrait of the pioneering scientist. What makes this book memorable isn’t just the science—it’s the clarity with which Sobel evokes Curie’s grit, intelligence, and solitude. In a world dominated by male institutions and fragile egos, Curie carved out a space not only to survive, but to transform science itself.

Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness is similarly intimate, though more philosophical. Drawing on American legal and political history, Rosen traces how the idea of “happiness” evolved from classical virtue to individual fulfillment. His book acts as a bridge between past and present, asking how the Founders’ conception of liberty and purpose translates into modern life.

Finally, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem and Titans of History offer sweeping panoramas of world history. Jerusalem is particularly compelling—a biography of a city that has witnessed more religious passion, conquest, and tragedy than perhaps any other. Montefiore manages to narrate this without reducing it to caricature. In Titans of History, he zooms out even further, offering biographical sketches of major historical figures from Hammurabi to Mandela. While more breezy and episodic, it reminds the reader that history is always the product of human choices—often flawed, sometimes visionary.

A Common Thread: Civilization Under Pressure

So what ties these twelve books together? At first glance, they range widely in subject and style. But read as a group, they seem to revolve around a core tension: how civilizations are built, how they are sustained, and how they fracture—through war, ideology, apathy, or internal contradiction.

Whether the topic is Machiavelli’s Ancient Rome, Churchill’s Britain, Sebald’s Germany, or Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the recurring question is this: how do societies balance power with principle, stability with freedom, and tradition with change? These books don’t offer easy answers. Some, like Ferguson or Murray, offer prescriptive warnings. Others, like Sebald or Junger, linger in the ambiguity and pain of aftermath.

Yet taken together, they offer something else: perspective. They show that history isn’t a neat progression or a morality tale. It’s a living, breathing record of decisions made under pressure. And reading these works in 2025—a time of rising authoritarianism, cultural anxiety, and digital fragmentation—I was reminded that history’s greatest lesson may be its refusal to simplify.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow: A Great and Complex Founder of America

Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton is one of those rare biographies that does two things at once: it resurrects a historical figure in full human complexity, and it makes a persuasive case that this figure mattered more than most readers were ever taught. Hamilton emerges not merely as a Founding Father, but as the engine of the early American republic—brilliant, abrasive, indispensable, and ultimately self-destructive.

Chernow begins with Hamilton’s astonishing rise from obscurity. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, orphaned young, and educated through sheer force of talent, Hamilton arrives in North America already sharpened by hardship. Chernow is unsparing here—Hamilton’s hunger for order, status, and permanence is rooted in chaos. This psychological grounding matters, because it explains everything that follows. Hamilton’s obsession with structure, credit, and authority was not abstract theory; it was survival instinct elevated into national policy.

Hamilton’s Revolutionary War service is one of the book’s great strengths. As aide-de-camp to George Washington, Hamilton becomes indispensable—drafting correspondence, managing logistics, and acting as Washington’s intellectual lieutenant. Chernow makes clear that Washington recognized Hamilton’s genius early and trusted him deeply, even when he found him exasperating. The relationship is portrayed as mutually formative: Washington gave Hamilton legitimacy and restraint; Hamilton gave Washington a mind capable of thinking several steps ahead. Without Hamilton, Washington’s presidency would have been weaker. Without Washington, Hamilton would likely have burned himself out even faster.

The heart of the book—and the reason it has had such a long cultural afterlife—is Chernow’s treatment of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. Here, Hamilton is not just a theorist but a relentless operator. His financial program—assumption of state debts, establishment of public credit, the Bank of the United States—was radical, controversial, and foundational. Chernow argues convincingly that Hamilton understood something his rivals did not: nations survive on confidence, not purity. Jefferson wanted a virtuous agrarian republic; Hamilton wanted a functioning one. History has largely sided with Hamilton, and Chernow does not pretend otherwise.

But this is not hagiography. Chernow is clear-eyed about Hamilton’s flaws, especially his inability to stop fighting. The political infighting with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison is presented as both ideological and personal. Hamilton’s pen was lethal, and he used it constantly. He could not resist humiliating opponents or escalating conflicts, even when discretion would have served him better. His feud with John Adams is particularly telling: Hamilton undermined a president from his own party out of intellectual contempt and strategic impatience, a move that all but guaranteed his political isolation.

The most devastating section of the book is Hamilton’s self-immolation in the Reynolds affair. Chernow treats this episode not as a scandal for its own sake but as a study in catastrophic judgment. Hamilton, obsessed with his reputation for probity, chose public confession over political survival. The result was moral clarity paired with total ruin. It is one of the strangest episodes in American political history, and Chernow narrates it with restraint and disbelief in equal measure.

The book’s final act—the rivalry with Aaron Burr and the fatal duel—is tragic precisely because it feels avoidable. Chernow resists easy moralizing. Burr is not a cartoon villain, and Hamilton is not a martyr. Instead, Chernow shows two men trapped by honor culture, pride, and accumulated grievance. Hamilton’s decision to throw away his shot, so to speak, reads less like noble sacrifice and more like exhaustion. He had been fighting all his life; the fight finally killed him.

What makes Chernow’s biography exceptional is its balance. Hamilton is neither sanitized nor dismissed. He is brilliant and reckless, visionary and intolerable. Chernow’s prose is clear, propulsive, and confident without being flashy. At nearly 800 pages, the book earns its length; there is very little padding. Every feud, memo, and policy debate builds toward a coherent portrait of a man who helped create the United States and then made himself impossible within it.

If there is a final judgment here, it is this: Hamilton was the Founder most attuned to modernity, and therefore the least comfortable in his own time. Chernow makes that case decisively. You finish the book convinced not only that Hamilton mattered, but that the country still runs—financially, bureaucratically, institutionally—on tracks he laid down. Loving this book is not surprising. It is serious history written with narrative force, and it leaves you thinking hard about power, ambition, and the costs of being right too soon.

In this year the nation Hamilton helped to found celebrates 250 years since The Declaration of Independence was published on July 4, 1776. I recently re-read On Revolution by Hannah Arendt in which she describes why most revolutions aspire to freedom and end in tyranny. Central to the book is her explanation of why the American Revolution succeeded when nearly all others failed. 

Will America continue into a more perfect union or after a quarter-millennium fall into the tyranny that is the fate of every other revolution?  This year 2026 will say a lot about America.