The project in Cape Town is the latest seeking to redress Africa’s reliance on the West for vaccines.

Western leaders are scrambling to defuse the crisis by reaching out to President Putin while also warning of sanctions.

Twenty years ago today, President George W. Bush delivered a State of the Union address that would instantly become one of the most bitterly controversial in U.S. history. At its core were short indictments of the aggressions and human-rights abuses of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

Then the kicker:

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

I was part of the speechwriting team that drafted those words. We’d lived together through the trauma of 9/11: not only that horrific day itself, but the nerve-jangling aftermath. The trauma redirected the perceptions and the judgment of national leaders. Bush had won office in a period of seeming peace and prosperity. Now it felt as if death could strike anywhere, anytime. Would suicide bombers attack movie theaters? Would teams of terrorist gunmen open fire in shopping malls? It all seemed horribly possible.

Beginning September 18, packets of anthrax were received at political and media offices in Washington and across the country. At least 22 people were infected; five of them died. On November 12, 2001, a passenger jetliner leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport crashed into the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, killing all 260 people aboard and five on the ground. The crash proved accidental, but initially we had to wonder: Had al-Qaeda landed a second strike inside the United States? About that time, I doubled the life insurance I carried to protect my young family.

Before 9/11, terror threats had been an issue for specialists inside the national-security apparatus. Now they physically reshaped the government. The Eisenhower Executive Office Building occupies a block in Washington bounded on the west by 17th Street, a busy roadway. For fear of car bombs, all the offices on that side of the building were emptied. E Street, to the south, was closed to traffic, and before authorized cars could enter, they were elaborately searched: trunks popped open for inspection, a Secret Service mirror run under the chassis, a dog sniffing for explosives.

The fervid atmosphere in the country biased citizens and officials alike to overheat rhetoric and overestimate dangers. I succumbed to that temptation myself; more senior people in government were no more resistant.

Meanwhile, the news from the combat zone in the war provoked by the terror attacks was disappointing and frustrating. In December 2001, U.S. forces and Afghan allies had cornered Osama bin Laden in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Bin Laden completed a last will and testament dated December 14, 2001. Yet somehow bin Laden escaped. The year ended with the Taliban overthrown, U.S. or coalition forces in control of all of Afghanistan’s cities, but the prime mission for which the United States fought the Taliban unfulfilled.

America had suffered much. It feared worse ahead.

The 2002 State of the Union address responded to those fears. It tried to specify where the next danger might come from—and to offer plans to guard against it. Bush’s answers would instantly come under ferocious criticism. The criticism reverberates to this day. And yet four core ideas in the speech have survived as enduring foundations of U.S. security policy.

[David Frum: The Iraq war was a failure. War with Iran would be worse.]

The speech’s first key idea was that even after 9/11, the most important threats to the United States still came from hostile states. Terrorists could pose a first-degree threat to the U.S. only if supported by a government. The 2002 State of the Union address is known as the “axis of evil” speech. But those were not its most important words. The most important words of the speech were: “States like these, and their terrorist allies …”

In 2002, that seemed a radical thing to say. September 11 had supposedly changed everything. Violence between states was so 20th century, and to worry about it was to expose oneself as backwards-looking, out-of-date.

What was backward then is forward now. The Islamic State terror group overtook al-Qaeda as a security threat precisely because it occupied territory in Syria and Iraq and formed a state of its own. By 2019, that state had been destroyed, and although ISIS the concept and murder franchise still exists, it has dropped far down the list of U.S.-government security concerns.

A second idea was that these hostile states and their terrorist allies presented an overlapping threat. Again, this idea was much scoffed at in 2002. But in the years since, the commonalities have come to light: a Syrian nuclear reactor, ultimately destroyed by Israel, that was built with help from North Korea and, according to a defector, money from Iran; Shiite Iran funding Sunni Hamas; Iranian–North Korean nuclear cooperation; North Korea providing Syria with supplies that could be used to manufacture poison gas, as reported by United Nations experts. These episodes of cooperation were not acts of friendship or alliance. They were opportunistic deals among states and groups joined by their shared hostility toward the United States. The national-security threats facing America were not simply one damn thing after another; just as the United States tried to build collective security for its friends, so too could U.S. adversaries work together to build collective insecurity.

Bush’s third big idea in the 2002 speech was to downgrade the importance of Afghanistan to the United States. A major question after 9/11 was how deeply the U.S. and allies should commit to Afghanistan. In many eyes, Afghanistan was “the good war,” the security project that should have first claim to U.S. resources. Against that view, Bush treated Afghanistan as one theater in a war on terror that would probably be decided elsewhere. Any large U.S. force in Afghanistan would have to be supplied either by road from Pakistan or by rail through Russia or through Russian-influenced Central Asian republics. Building a stable replacement government would depend on Afghan elites with agendas of their own, agendas that included massive self-enrichment. The deeper the U.S. commitment, the more expensive the ultimate U.S. failure would be. It would take almost 20 years before President Joe Biden would agree that the time had come to call it quits in Afghanistan. By then, the former good war looked more like the most hopeless of all the post-9/11 conflicts.

The fourth core idea in the speech was a determination to regard terrorism as a tool of power. Previously, some policy makers had an instinct to treat terrorism as an almost impersonal result of huge and abstract social problems. Compress enough poverty, grievance, and despair together, and terrorism would result. By this light, terrorism becomes almost a predictable consequence of social conditions, an involuntary, even mechanical, response, like an electric shock or the collapse of a bridge. In this view, the terrorist or terror agent is barely an agent of history at all. The political choices have been made by others, notably the terrorist’s victims and targets. Bush’s speech, by contrast, presented terrorism instead as a strategic choice that could be accepted or refused. “My hope is that all nations will heed our call and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own.” He argued that American action could alter the strategic calculus that enabled terrorism. “Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will.”

Almost from the day Bush delivered the speech, his critics have blamed him for creating the problems the speech attempted to describe. Iran would have been friendly if Bush had not called it names! Yes, Iran had clashed with the Taliban in the 1990s, and was certainly glad to see the United States drawn into a fight against them. But it didn’t want to see the U.S. win that fight, and establish any kind of stable pro-Western regime next door to Iran. Iran was never going to stop backing its main terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Iran began building a new enrichment site in the city of Natanz, north of Isfahan, in 2001, before the “axis of evil” speech. The site was revealed to the world by an Iranian resistance group in August 2002, just after the speech.

[Dominic Tierney: America keeps accidentally helping Iran]

Iran’s support for terrorism proceeded nonstop too. It might not much care for al-Qaeda. But Iran was more than willing to outfit other Sunni terrorist groups, and to offer supervised sanctuary to bin Laden relatives. In January 2002, a ship carrying 50 tons of arms and explosives was intercepted at sea by Israel, which accused Iran of sending them to Gaza. Hezbollah, which was present and operating inside the United States, according to testimony to Congress by the FBI in February 2002.

Bush’s speech is now remembered as a major milestone on the path to war in Iraq. But in January 2002, the president had not yet declared a decision to topple Saddam Hussein. Even now, it’s still not clear to me when Bush made that decision. From the fall of 2001 through the spring of 2002, war in Iraq was always discussed as a possibility, a hypothetical. That’s how the speechwriting team got the assignment that led to the State of the Union address: If the president wanted to talk about Iraq, what might he say?

The journalist Robert Draper painstakingly reconstructed the timeline of the decision to invade Iraq in his 2020 book, To Start a War. Draper’s reporting depicts Bush as deeply hostile to Saddam Hussein from the start, but uncommitted to any single policy against the Iraqi dictator until late into the summer of 2002. In an April 5, 2002, interview with Trevor McDonald of Britain’s ITV, Bush said, “I’ve made up my mind that Saddam needs to go.” That very evening, Bush had dinner with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and told him that he had not yet decided when or how Saddam would be made to go.

Yet well before the summer of 2002, the preparation for war had acquired a momentum of its own. The previous February, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley organized a series of meetings to study the issues that might arise from an Iraq war. Hadley himself was not at all an ardent advocate of war against Iraq. But by some fateful impetus, the attempt to think through the war before it started only accelerated the decision it was meant to ponder. “By institutionalizing such discussions, Hadley had … created bureaucratic locomotion for a policy that had yet to be debated, and in fact never would be,” Draper observed.

By the end of the summer of 2002, the moment of decision—once assigned to an unspecific future—had somehow shifted into the unrecorded past. In September 2002, Bush addressed the UN and presented the Iraqi regime with a sequence of ultimatums that closed almost all his own exits. Yet he still had no real plan for what would happen if Iraq refused the ultimatum. The Pentagon wrote a deployment plan to get Americans into Baghdad. Nobody inside the administration had clear responsibility for planning for the day after the Americans arrived.

The January 2002 State of the Union speech had cited Iraq as only one danger among many. But over the months ahead, those other dangers would be displaced by the singular focus on Iraq. North Korea would stage a first nuclear test in 2006, then a second and more successful test in 2009. Iran too was closing in on a bomb around that time, a threat that the Obama administration tried to negotiate away but that haunts U.S. policy to this day.

The list of threats that Bush itemized 20 years ago was not imaginary. If anything, the ranks of hostile anti-U.S. regimes have multiplied since 2002. Back then, Vladimir Putin’s Russia sometimes cooperated with the United States on important strategic issues, including the war in Afghanistan. China was accepting major economic reforms to qualify for entry into the World Trade Organization. Neither regime was liberal toward its people or friendly to the West. But 20 years ago, optimists could reasonably hope that Russia and China might soon evolve in better directions. Those hopes have long ago been disappointed. Both regimes turned to the worse, and to each other.

Putin’s invasion plans for Ukraine offer China a “new world order” made safe for autocrats. As Putin threatens Ukraine, Chinese warplanes menace Taiwan. Earlier this month, Putin welcomed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Moscow. Raisi is an outspoken advocate of Iranian-Russian cooperation against the United States. Last week, China, Iran, and Russia held joint naval drills in the northern Indian Ocean. Maybe axis of evil is too melodramatic a phrase for our polarized and disillusioned era. But we need words to describe when the bad guys cooperate against the United States and its democratic allies.

Like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War casts a long shadow. It did not deliver the results promised, for Iraq or the United States. Perhaps even without U.S. intervention, Iraq would have collapsed into civil war, as Syria did. That cannot be answered. But there is still wisdom to be gained from the post 9/11 moment. President Bush’s 2002 warnings contain insights that can be repurposed for a changed world.

Vietnamese religious icon was globally recognised for helping spread the practice of mindfulness in the West.

The Ukrainian president told foreign media the "biggest risk" for his country was "internal destabilisation" rather than the prospect of a full Russian invasion.

Night after night, the host of the top-rated show on Fox News repeats Vladimir Putin’s talking points justifying aggression against Ukraine and opposing U.S. aid to that threatened sovereign country. Tucker Carlson’s influence is felt across right-wing social media, where it is amplified by figures such as Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Glenn Greenwald, and Mollie Hemingway. A highly visible coterie of socially conservative intellectuals also argues the case against helping Ukraine.

Meanwhile, day after day, Republican officeholders in the House and the Senate urge more support for Ukraine. That list includes not only traditionalists such as Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, but also many legislators who got close to former President Donald Trump, such as Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham.

Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, has backed the Biden administration’s approach, as have the top Republicans on the House Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has blasted Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy as too weak on Russia, not too strong.

[Read: The battle for the future of the West]

There are exceptions to the pro-Ukraine norm among Republican elected officials. Rand Paul in the Senate and Paul Gosar in the House have dissented. Some next-generation Republican office seekers, especially those backed by the Republican mega-donor Peter Thiel, have also followed the Carlson-Bannon-Greenwald line. They include J. D. Vance, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. Eric Greitens—the disgraced former governor of Missouri now running for the Republican nomination in the U.S. Senate race there—has issued vividly inflammatory statements against aid to Ukraine as “the war mongering of DC elites.”

Conversely, some conservative talking heads have embraced the politicians’ pro-Ukraine position. National Review editorialized in favor of aid to Ukraine, for example. The right-leaning Commentary has published important Ukraine statements too. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has also written forcefully for deterrence of Russian aggression.

But broadly, Republican elected officials and the think tanks that advise them are staunchly pro-Ukraine; conservative talkers (especially on TV and social media) are varying degrees of anti-Ukraine. Russia-Ukraine is becoming a trial of strength, not only between Putin and NATO, but between different parts of the conservative world. Over the past half-dozen years, such intra-conservative disputes have usually ended in abject defeat for Republican elected officials. In New York magazine this week, for example, Jonathan Chait details the long, slow yielding of Republican politicians to anti-vax delusions.

Yet some signs show that with Ukraine and Putin, the conservative entertainment complex may have overstepped. A new poll by the Pew Research Center finds that large majorities of Americans view Russia as an enemy or a competitor. Large majorities regard the Russian buildup against Ukraine as a threat to U.S. interests. Even more interesting, Pew finds—for once—no significant partisan disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over the Russia-Ukraine issue. Conservative talkers don’t always win their battles against Republican elected officials, who successfully prevented Trump from appointing underqualified personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board, for example.

[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. is naive about Russia. Ukraine can’t afford to be.]

Trump, who in the past was always ready to speak warmly of Putin, may sense that neither the American public nor the majority of his own party is with the Fox News universe on aiding Ukraine. He released a vague statement limited to bragging nonspecifically that the crisis at the Ukraine-Russia border would not be happening if he were still president, edging away from his anti-Ukraine media allies. Florida Governor Ron Desantis, a would-be Trump successor, has made no statement on the Russia-Ukraine issue at all.

As powerful as Fox News messaging is, scenes of violence after Russian aggression sends Ukrainian refugees streaming westward to safety would be powerful too. Americans are never eager to get involved in other people’s fights. But they remain deeply committed to a vision of their country as a force for good in the world. Foreign dictators who counted on American passivity in the face of aggression, and isolationists who hoped to profit politically from that passivity, have again and again been jolted by Americans’ dislike of tyrants and bullies. For all of Americans’ weariness after the 9/11 wars, for all of the polarization and radicalization of U.S. politics, Putin and his friends on American TV and social media may find themselves surprised by another such jolt.

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At 3 a.m. I’m jolted awake. The room is dark and still. I grab my phone and scan sports scores and Twitter. Still awake. A faceless physician whispers in my mind: To overcome middle-of-the-night insomnia, experts say you ought to get out of bed … I get out of bed. I pour a glass of water and drink it. I go back to bed. Still awake. Perhaps you know the feeling. Like millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people around the world, I suffer from so-called mid-sleep awakenings that can keep me up for hours.

One day, I was researching my nocturnal issues when I discovered a cottage industry of writers and sleep hackers who claim that sleep is a nightmare because of the industrial revolution, of all things. Essays in The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine recommended a preindustrial fix for restlessness called “segmented sleep.” In medieval Europe, and perhaps centuries earlier, people routinely went to sleep around nightfall and woke up around midnight—only to go back to sleep a few hours later, until morning. They slept sort of like I do, but they were Zen about it. Then, they said, modernity came along and ruined everything by pressuring everybody to sleep in one big chunk.

[Read: The lie we tell ourselves about going to sleep early]

The romanticization of preindustrial sleep fascinated me. It also snapped into a popular template of contemporary internet analysis: If you experience a moment’s unpleasantness, first blame modern capitalism. So I reached out to Roger Ekirch, the historian whose work broke open the field of segmented sleep more than 20 years ago.

In the 1980s, Ekirch was researching a book about nighttime before the industrial revolution. One day in London, wading through public records, he stumbled on references to “first sleep” and “second sleep” in a crime report from the 1600s. He had never seen the phrases before. When he broadened his search, he found mentions of first sleep in Italian (primo sonno), French (premier sommeil), and even Latin (primo somno); he found documentation in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America.

When sleep was divided into a two-act play, people were creative with how they spent the intermission. They didn’t have anxious conversations with imaginary doctors; they actually did something. During this dorveille, or “wake-sleep,” people got up to pee, hung out by the fire, had sex, or prayed. They reflected on their dreams and commingled with the spiritual realm, both the divine and the diabolical. In the 1550s, Martin Luther wrote of his strategies to ward off the devil: “Almost every night when I wake up … I instantly chase him away with a fart.”

Today’s sleep writers often wield Ekirch’s research to suggest that segmented sleep (or, as Ekirch calls it, biphasic—two-phase—sleep) is old, and one-sleep is new, and therefore today’s sleepers are doing it wrong. But that’s not the full story, he told me.

Preindustrial sleep was nothing to romanticize. Death stalked our slumber for centuries. Late-night crime was rampant, and the home itself was a death trap, as slapdash construction left houses vulnerable to fire, leaking roofs, terrible heat or cold, and what Ekirch calls “the trifecta of early modern entomology: fleas, lice, and bedbugs.” As for that romantic French dorveille, it was functionally a second workday for many women, who rose at midnight to finish domestic chores. And ancient soporifics—such as poisonous leaves and various opiate concoctions—were roughly as likely to kill you as they were to induce REM.

[Read: Why do we need to sleep?]

In the 1700s, the industrial revolution—its light, its caffeine, its clocks, and above all, its work schedules—took Europe’s biphasic sleep in its hairy arms and mushed the two phases together. A surging economy made a virtue of productivity and instilled “an increasing sense of time consciousness” in the West, Ekirch told me. By the mid-1800s, “Early Rising” movements had taken off in England and America. New artificial lights delayed bedtimes, while new factory schedules required early waking. The lit world altered our internal clocks too. “Every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep,” Charles Czeisler, a Harvard sleep scientist, has said. When a 1990s study at the National Institute of Mental Health deprived a cohort of male subjects of light at night, their sleep became segmented after a few weeks.

This makes it sound like segmented sleep is humanity’s natural habit, and that the industrial revolution and modern capitalism despoiled our perfect rest.

But humans have never had a universal method of slumber. A 2015 study of hunter-gatherer societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia found that most foragers enjoyed one long sleep. Two years later, another study found that a rural society in Madagascar practiced segmented sleep. Two years after that, a study found that the indigenous residents of Tanna, in the South Pacific, largely had one uninterrupted sleep.

Even within preindustrial Europe, sleep contained multitudes. Reviewing the diaries of European writers such as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Ekirch found several allusions to unified sleep. Summarizing this complicated literature, he told me that “patterns of sleep in non-Western cultures appear to have been much more diverse” than those in Europe, but that they were truly diverse everywhere.

There is no evidence that sleep was universally segmented, and there is also little evidence that segmented sleep is better. A 2021 meta-analysis of studies on biphasic sleep schedules found that segmented-sleeping subjects actually reported “lower sleep quality … and spent more time in lighter stages of sleep.” One reasonable takeaway is that biphasic sleep is like anarchical foraging: Both might have well served some ancient populations some of the time, but neither of them offers a clear solution to modern problems.

I asked Ekirch this question: As the historian most associated with biphasic sleep, had his research encouraged him, a spouse, or a friend, to become a biphasic sleeper? “Not at all,” he said. “At no time in history have conditions for human slumber been better than today.” Compared with 99 percent of our ancient ancestors, we have better beds, better blankets, better houses, and fewer late-night pests. If the purpose of sleep is mental and physical well-being, “there is very good reason to believe that uninterrupted sleep at night best achieves that outcome,” Ekirch told me.

The upshot of sleep’s preindustrial and postindustrial history is a simple, short, and consistent message: Sleep is adaptable, but it improves with routine. Different tricks work for different tribes, but in the end, we are a diverse species united by a common circadian rhythm that craves consistency. “Sleep is very flexible, when you look cross-culturally,” says Dorothy Bruck, of Australia’s Sleep Health Foundation. “Your body really does like routine. Find what works for you, and keep that routine going.”

[Read: I found the key to the kingdom of sleep]

I have spent countless hours obsessing over my sleep, tracking my sleep quality on sophisticated devices, and reading (and reading and reading) about the thing I cannot do well. Sleep optimization can backfire by creating an in-the-moment pressure to solve the problem of wakefulness as if one is trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube against the clock. As every insomniac knows, “trying” to fall asleep is a self-defeating paradox. Insomnia is a beast that feasts on its own self-generated anxiety.

When I reached out to Ekirch, coming off a bad night’s rest, I hoped that the historian might have a practical tip. He didn’t. History is not a self-help book. But it has its own strange comforts, and our correspondence was deeply helpful in another way.

Ekirch told me that he’s heard from many people that simply knowing about the history of segmented sleep is its own relief. “Happily, there is mounting testimony from North America, Western Europe, and Australia that knowledge of this pattern has actually helped to alleviate anxiety, permitting some individuals to fall back to sleep more readily,” he said. Rather than see the legacy of medieval rest as an operating manual, I see it as a balm. My 3-a.m. awakenings aren’t an unnatural disorder, but an ancestral echo. Maybe that’s something to tell myself in the middle of the night, instead of fighting the sleep doctor in my head: It’ll be all right. We’ve been here before.