Earl O'Garro

There is a particular kind of grief reserved for the moment a man who knew better decides, in full view of the country, to pretend he did not. It is not the grief of the fool, who never understood. It is the grief of watching understanding itself bend, quietly, under the weight of a title and a flag and the warm approval of powerful rooms. Consider Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's chief of policy, who spent the better part of two decades teaching anyone who would listen that th

There is a particular American habit, older than any of us and more durable than our memory, of beginning a thing we do not intend to finish and calling the beginning a victory. We did it again this winter. On the twenty-eighth of February, under the name Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel opened the largest air campaign the region had seen since the buildings of Baghdad came down in 2003, and a country that had spent the cold months watching the Iranian regime

What follows is my opinion, and mine alone. A man can tell a great deal about a country by watching what frightens it, and this week I have been watching who flinches at the rumor of peace. On Sunday the President of the United States told Benjamin Netanyahu that an agreement with Iran might be signed within days, and the word went out as good news, the way the end of any war is supposed to be good news. Yet I notice that not everyone in this story wants the thing they claim

There is a kind of lie a country tells itself when it wants something for nothing, and we have been telling it for the better part of two decades. The lie is that money can be conjured without consequence, that a central bank can hold the price of borrowing below the cost of living and call the difference prosperity. In May the lie came due again. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.2 percent over the year, the steepest climb since the spring of 2023, and the dollar in your pocke