“The failures of America’s war on terror were rooted in a misdiagnosis of the problem. The Bush administration promoted the idea that the 9/11 hijackers were motivated by their hatred of American values and rejected any notion that U.S. policies contributed to either anti-American sentiment or violent extremism. ‘They’ hated us for who we are, it was argued, not what we do. … While the intent of the American military strategy was to deny terrorist groups safe havens, the practical effect was the opposite. American military interventions destabilized entire regions and created the kind of lawless anarchy in which militant groups proliferated. U.S. interventions also exacerbated anti-American sentiments and allowed militant groups to portray themselves as nationalist defenders fighting an occupying enemy.” (09/08/26)
“Mechanistic interpretability is the science of ‘reading an AI’s mind’. Large language models are ‘grown, not built’. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how. But a neural network is just a set of simulated neurons on a computer. The person with the computer can see the neurons, the connections between them, and which ones activate when the AI answers questions. So it seems like it should be possible to ‘reverse engineer’ the AI. … Unfortunately this is very hard.” (09/08/26)
“Two terms, dozens of announced withdrawals, and the Army’s brigades are still unpacking their gear in Europe, the Pacific, and beyond. Rhetoric about restraint and retrenchment is one thing; the discipline to see it through is another. On that score, the Trump administration has been exactly what its critics always suspected: all talk, no action.” (09/08/26)
“American forces are conducting combat operations in South America right now. If that comes as news, it is because the administration has disclosed the mission only in fragments, and Congress has not forced a public accounting. United States Green Berets are operating alongside Ecuadorian forces in the northern province of Esmeraldas in what the provincial governor described as joint operations against ‘narcoterrorism.’ Neither government has said which organizations the ground operations are targeting, what the troops are doing or how many Americans are involved.” (09/08/26)
“The Trump administration sent Congress its civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. Asked what the deal permits, the president wrote: There will be no enrichment of material. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, has said the opposite. The agreement gives Riyadh a pathway to enrich uranium on its own soil, and in doing so the potential for a Saudi nuclear Bomb. To placate fears Wright has put enrichment years down the road but not in doubt. Wright is describing the document. Trump is describing a country he is at war with to prevent from doing exactly this.” (09/08/260
“Summer passed. People traveled, went into nature, spent time with family, laughed, rested, and enjoyed life—and that is a good thing. Now school has started again, and children are walking back into classrooms with backpacks, excitement, and plans for another year. But for many families, there is no return to normal. Since the war in Iran began earlier this year, civilians have been killed, injured, displaced, and traumatized. Sometimes their stories reach us. Sometimes they barely break through the noise. I still think about the girls’ elementary school in Minab, where more than 100 children were killed. They were children. Students. We call children ‘angels’, and then somehow their deaths become another statistic of war.” (09/08/26)
“According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the military interventions we collectively know as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) led to the deaths of over 900,000 people and cost the United States more than $8 trillion. Afghanistan and Iraq ended in failure. Most Americans (at least, those not named Marc Thiessen or Bill Kristol) believe that the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East were a mistake. Indeed, this was a major part of Donald Trump’s initial appeal: ‘They lied,’ he said of the GWOT’s architects in 2016. We are now a quarter of a century on from the horrific events of September 11. And looking back, it is more important than ever to understand what caused them, and why bin Laden seemed to have gotten what he wanted out of the attacks.” (09/08/26)
“Labor Day is a great time to remember that we can make workers vastly better off by empowering more of them to vote with their feet, both within countries and through international migration.” (09/07/26)
