Earl O'Garro

I was standing in the customs line at Haneda when the news reached me. That is the truth of it, and there is no more honest way to begin. I had come to Tokyo on business with the United States Department of War, which is what our Department of Defense has been called since the President signed the order restoring the older name last year, and I had come at the far end of a Fourth of July weekend that was already, before I had boarded the plane, a weekend of small partings. I

The country turns two hundred and fifty years old today. That is not a small number. Most countries do not last two hundred and fifty years, and the ones that do are the ones that were willing to argue with themselves in the open, out loud, at the kitchen table, in the courthouse, and on the anniversary of their own founding. So I want to argue with mine today, in the way arguments with family are offered on birthdays, which is to say with the door still open and the coat sti

Three Septembers ago, before mBridge had cleared its first sixty billion dollars and before the President of the United States had signed an order forbidding the federal government from so much as studying a sovereign digital dollar, I wrote that the political convulsions then crossing the African continent looked, to my eye, like the opening of a window. The regime changes in Niger and in Gabon, the cracking of old French commercial arrangements, the visible exhaustion of th

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