This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“People in the Northern Hemisphere are now neck-deep in a summer of travel—and so, too, are the coronaviruses they’re carrying,” our Science writer Katherine J. Wu reported in early July. As the summer goes on and the coronavirus subvariant BA.5 continues to spread, I checked back in with Katie about where things are.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Where do the Democrats find these guys? A world without white people A key 9/11 plotter is dead. He was already irrelevant. “A Bizarre Plateau”

Isabel Fattal: Where does America’s COVID-19 situation stand right now?

Katherine J. Wu: Things are not great right now. Based on the patterns of cases that we’re seeing, it’s pretty clear that we’re at a very high level, probably comparable to what we were seeing in terms of caseloads this past winter—among the worst caseloads of the pandemic.

It is true that hospitalization and death rates are down, but the more people you have infected, even a very small percentage can turn into an untenable number of hospitalizations and deaths. And every infection carries the risk of long COVID, or taking people away from school or work or their family. And the worrisome thing is, for the past few months, we’ve been at this bizarre plateau in terms of case counts not really coming back down and looking better.

Isabel: Last week, the Biden administration announced a plan to roll out retooled booster shots, which are expected to offer better protection against BA.5, in September. What’s your reaction to that news?

Katie: That sounds promising, but a lot still really needs to happen before then, and that’s what worries me. These vaccines are still being manufactured. They have not yet been authorized. The FDA hasn’t even seen data to show whether they outperform our current formulation in humans, and if so, by how much. Until that happens, the CDC can’t recommend an eligibility structure.

Is it going to go to high-risk people first? Are we going to have enough doses? We know that COVID funding is an absolute mess right now. And if we have limited doses, who gets them first? Are we going to have enough doses for young, healthy people to get them? Are we going to have enough doses for kids? Our youngest kids are still on their primary series.

The main worry has never been the technology. The concern is deployment, and making sure that people are able and willing to get these shots in an equitable way.

Isabel: What do we know right now about how effective these updated boosters would be against BA.5?

Katie: There’s not a lot of data to go off, so I’m going to be tentative here. I think we can expect them to be an improvement, but I can’t tell you if it’s going to be a 5 percent improvement or a 60 percent improvement. The other big asterisk on this is, what’s going to be around in September? Is it still going to be BA.5, is it going to be BA.6, or is it going to be another variant entirely?

The new vaccine is going to be half the original recipe and half something that is better tailored to BA.4/BA.5. And that, in a way, was a good bet hedge. That’s going to still give us the best of both worlds in terms of broadening our response.  

Isabel: What is one thing the Biden administration should be doing in its COVID-19 response that it’s not doing?

Katie: I think the main thing is to stop with the vaccine monomania. Don’t get me wrong: Vaccines are necessary for this response, but not sufficient. It’s been bizarre to watch the Biden administration say “Get boosted right now” while also loosening guidance around gathering, masking, and distancing, and claiming that America can practically declare independence from the virus. These things don’t match up.

We need multiple approaches to reduce transmission. It’s going bonkers right now, and this is not a sustainable way to coexist with this virus. I’m not saying that people need to have mask mandates forever, but when transmission rates are this high, it is a good idea to think about masking, to think about testing more often, paying attention to who is up-to-date on their vaccines and making sure that our approaches are complementing each other. We still have huge issues with access to Paxlovid, access to tests, access to everything.

Isabel: What are some of your pet peeves about the way the pandemic is being talked about right now?

Katie: We still need to care, but fearmongering too much is also going to make people check out. It’s not necessarily productive to say “Everyone is going to get long COVID by next year” (long COVID’s important to pay attention to, but this almost certainly isn’t true) or “This is the worst variant we have seen so far” (yes, variants are continuing to evolve, but we also have the tools to fight them). Find a way to meet people where they are, get them to tune in, but also trust that they can handle nuance.

Isabel: What else should Americans be thinking about right now in regard to the pandemic?

Katie: I just hope that with all the news about different outbreaks and viruses, people don’t accept this as normal. This is not normal. This is a sign that our public-health responses are failing, that we’re not leveraging the resources we have. This could become our normal if we let it, but it shouldn’t have to.

Related:

The BA.5 wave is what COVID normal looks like. America should’ve been able to handle monkeypox. Today’s News Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, marking the highest-level visit by an American official in 25 years. Five states are holding primaries today. In Arizona, several Trump-endorsed candidates are on the ballot, including Mark Finchem, who brought the “Stop the Steal” movement to the state. The maker of Oatly recalled 53 products that may have been contaminated. Evening Read (Courtesy Chris Perez Howard)

His Mother’s Life Was a Mystery He Needed to Solve

By Lenika Cruz

Writing about the dead is difficult business. Whenever I write about my mother, I spend a lot of time struggling to recall: How did she take her coffee? What music made her dance? When she laughed, did she throw her head back, like I do? My ability to answer these questions—to try to create an honest portrait of her on the page—is constrained by the five and a half years we spent together before she died. To fill in the gaps, I’ve interviewed family and friends, even built an archive of documents and photos. Each piece of new information—her U.S. naturalization certificate, her honeymoon pictures—is a gift, but it’s also a reminder of all that I will never know about her.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why Britain changed its China stance A third nuclear age is upon us. Photo essay: When women enter the frame Culture Break (Michael Freimuth)

Read. A new cultural history of cheerfulness reveals its dark side.

Watch. Somebody Somewhere, an HBO Max show that’s been renewed for a second season. “Expect tears of sadness and of joy,” as our critic puts it.

Or try something else from our watch list of TV shows for short attention spans.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Covering the pandemic isn’t easy, so I asked Katie where she’s found a welcome distraction. Her answer: Rachel Gross’s new book, Vagina Obscura. “It’s a delightfully written dive into one of the human body’s least appreciated organs—one we shouldn’t be embarrassed to study or talk about, in all sorts of settings,” she told me.

— Isabel

As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.

From 2020 onward, however, Britain transformed itself from China’s best partner in Europe to its harshest critic, sweeping away decades of foreign-policy consensus in the most drastic such shift in the Western world. Britain became the first European power to formally block Huawei from its 5G telecoms network, led the global condemnation of Beijing’s barbaric treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, revoked the U.K. broadcasting license of China’s state-controlled CGTN, and offered a route to British citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong who want to flee Beijing’s political repression.

The reasons for this turn were many: Brexit meant that Britain, having cut ties with its closest economic partner, the EU, could not afford to risk its relationship with its closest security ally, the United States, as well. The pandemic then entrenched public concern about Western reliance on China. And perhaps most important of all was Donald Trump. Even as he imposed steel tariffs on allies and belittled their leaders, the American president demanded that they stand with the United States against China.

Whereas Britain’s future had once seemed Chinese, it was back to being American. But in recent months, something strange started happening: London began softening its stance toward China again. Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson this year approved a reopening of trade talks with China, and his government approved the sale of a microchip manufacturer to a Chinese company (though this is now in doubt).

Britain’s diplomatic back-and-forth in recent years has offered among the most extreme examples of how states are dealing with the wider geopolitical upheaval that has been taking place in response to China’s rise, a problem that no one yet seems to know the answer to. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has formed around the notion that “engagement” with Beijing has failed, and that China is the only great rival to American supremacy in the 21st century. For continental Europe, Beijing is less an adversary than a risk to be accommodated, managed, and recognized, and the growth of its power an opportunity to carve out more “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. For Britain, trapped between the U.S. and Europe, it is a mixture of all of these things.

[Read: What returning to China taught me about China]

To understand what was going on, I spoke with more than a dozen senior government officials, diplomats, foreign-policy analysts, and lawmakers across the U.S., Britain, and Europe. (Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government deliberations.) From these conversations a picture emerged of Britain clinging tightly to the new U.S. consensus, partly through judgment of its best interests and partly because of American pressure, while seeking to ensure its economic priorities with China are kept alive as much as possible as it faces up to the reality of the 21st century. Britain’s example shows how the widening standoff between Washington and Beijing will transform midsize powers that seek to avoid being drawn into a new cold war—and, more important, how the U.S. will not easily be able to maintain its grip on the world order that it created.

For decades, Britain followed a fairly consistent line in its policy toward Beijing, trying to balance security concerns against economic opportunities but typically erring on the side of engagement.

As early as 2003, Britain’s main telecommunications company approached Tony Blair’s government to seek permission to work with what was then a little-known Chinese company, Huawei, to upgrade the U.K.’s network. The partnership was waved through by officials who were more concerned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and Russia than some harmless Chinese firm.

By 2008, however, British intelligence agencies were warning that the Chinese state could use Huawei to gain access to Britain’s telecoms network. Soon after, the government—then led by Gordon Brown—established a watchdog to monitor Huawei, creating a first-of-its-kind arrangement involving a group of security-cleared former British officials and experts who would keep an eye on Huawei from inside the company on behalf of Britain. In effect, Britain had become sufficiently concerned about China spying on it that it demanded a special unit be created within Huawei to spy on the Chinese, but was insufficiently concerned to cancel Huawei contracts.

This was the environment in which David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010—one in which cautious partnership with China had yielded concrete benefits for the U.K., but with hard-to-gauge costs. Over his six years in charge, Cameron would expand the relationship in an attempt to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and open new markets for its financial-services industry. In 2014, London became one of the first international clearing centers for Chinese currency, before racing ahead of its competitors to become the major offshore center for renminbi trading. The following year, Cameron welcomed Xi to London for a state visit during which the British leader declared the beginning of a “golden era” in relations.

This was no one-off, but the culmination of a British strategy stretching back to at least the turn of the century. Britain was using its membership in the EU to turn itself into China’s financial gateway to the continent. Then came Brexit.

Following the referendum, Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, a more security-conscious China hawk who had spent the previous six years in the Home Office and was responsible for the domestic-intelligence agency MI5. In one of her first acts, she paused a decision on the construction of a British nuclear plant that was to receive Chinese investment. Then, in early 2018, on a three-day trip to China, May refused to sign off on a deal in which Britain would offer formal support for Xi’s infrastructure-building (and influence-generating) Belt and Road Initiative.

Once again, economic interests squashed political concerns. May’s early caution over China gave way to the same pressures that had pushed Cameron, Brown, and Blair: In April 2019, news leaked that May was preparing to give the go-ahead for Huawei’s involvement in building the country’s 5G network. By then, she had put aside her concerns about Chinese involvement in Britain’s nuclear industry as well. And then, once again, Brexit intervened.

May was replaced by Johnson, a far more liberal figure when it came to security and China. Immediately, Johnson slipped back into the old British policy, announcing that despite furious opposition from the U.S., the U.K. would allow Huawei to play a part in Britain’s 5G rollout. It was, in essence, a continuation of the Mayite policy—which itself was little more than a continuation of the cautious engagement that had been in place for decades.

[David Frum: Why Biden is right to end ambiguity on China]

The morning after Johnson’s Huawei decision, however, a Chinese student in Britain rang an emergency health line complaining that he and his mother visiting from Hubei felt unwell. At 7:50 p.m. that night, two paramedics dressed in hazmat suits arrived at the hotel where they were staying to take them to hospital. They would be the first people in Britain to test positive for the coronavirus. More than 200,000 people would ultimately die of COVID-19 in Britain. China’s role as nation zero, and its initial attempts to suppress news of the outbreak, would spark denunciations across the democratic world and demands for retaliation.

Even before the pandemic, opinion in the U.S. had shifted sharply against China, thanks in large part to the ferocity—and centrality—of Trump’s attacks on the country. This discord was almost inevitable anyway, given the great-power competition between the pair, but Trump played his part in speeding this process up and giving it political fire.

By May 2020, the U.S. had increased pressure on Britain and other European allies by unveiling sanctions on Huawei that, in effect, stopped it from being able to use American technology, a move that meant the British security services could no longer guarantee Huawei’s safety, because the company would soon be using non-Western technology that the British did not fully understand. This, in fact, was the very reason the U.S. had imposed its sanctions, and they served as a hammer blow to Britain’s strategy of careful engagement with China. In July 2020, Johnson’s government became the first in Europe to announce that Huawei would be banned from Britain’s 5G network. Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador in London, said Britain’s decision on Huawei, as well as the U.K.’s policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong, had “poisoned the atmosphere” between the two countries and Britain would “pay the price.” The Chinese state media threatened “retaliatory responses.”

In the end, London’s long-held strategy thus collapsed not through its own proactive choice but because of choices being made elsewhere. British foreign policy was forced to adapt to a world it did not want, and had tried to avoid.

When I put this to British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, she rejected (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) the idea that Britain had, effectively, been made to change its China policy.

Truss, the favorite to replace Johnson as prime minister, told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had brought together countries against Russia, some of which might not be liberal or democratic but that nevertheless did not want to see “a world where might is right.”

In reply, I suggested that, in part, might is right. After all, we live in an American world, where the U.S. uses its power to set the rules. “I don’t agree with that,” Truss replied. “We don’t live in an American world. We live in a world where there is a coalition of nations who … subscribe to the values of freedom and democracy.”

I cited the example of China. As late as 2019, Britain was trying to push ahead with the Huawei 5G deal. “We changed because the Americans changed,” I said.

“That was not the reason we changed,” she responded.

I pushed back. “The Americans changed the rules of the game, and we didn’t have the ability to guarantee the security” of the telecoms network.

Again, she was insistent. “That was not the reason we changed. We changed because it was the right thing to do. I was in the government when the policy changed, and we changed because it was the right thing to do.”

[Read: How China wants to replace the U.S. order]

I pointed out that the same government, made up of the same people, had made a different decision earlier in the same year about what was right before changing its mind.

“Well, that is true,” Truss replied. “Every government, Tom, has its internal discussions and I can’t reveal the internal discussions that took place on both occasions. However, we did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Whatever your conclusion, to look at British foreign policy now is to see almost a complete overlap with the U.S., whether on the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change, the importance of spending more on defense, NATO, the threat posed by Russia, or—now—China. One of the lessons of the Huawei policy shift, and Britain’s shift more broadly, is that the U.S. can still force its allies into line if it is prepared to take its gloves off.

But under the surface, things are not quite so simple.

There are signs that, actually, Britain’s old policy is once again being quietly rebuilt. Amid intense U.S. pressure, including threats to curtail transatlantic intelligence sharing, Britain changed tack, falling into line. Yet since then, Britain has drifted back toward its position of cautiously opening up to China as far as it feels is safe—in part spurred by a frustration with Washington.

In February, it emerged that Johnson had given the green light to reopen trade talks with China that had been paused for years. Then it was revealed that the U.K. government had apparently approved the sale of a British microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm, only for that decision to be kicked into the long grass. On each occasion, the announcements sparked a backlash among China skeptics in London. May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who had pushed for stricter controls on any economic opening to China, reacted with resigned alarm. “It seems we will never learn,” he wrote. Tough policies over Xinjiang and Hong Kong remain in place, but the recent reports point to a softening of the hardest edges of Britain’s China policy. The reasons indicate the limits of Washington’s leadership in its confrontation with Beijing.

Today, some within the British government share a sense that Brexit and Johnson’s previous, seemingly warm relationship with Trump continue to be held against the U.K. by some in the Biden administration. Despite Britain’s being the most hawkish European ally on Russia and China, spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and supporting U.S. efforts on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.K. believes it is treated as just another ally, criticized for its push to renegotiate its Brexit deal with the EU and ignored in its ambition to strike a free-trade deal with Washington. If this is the case, some in London wonder, why not be more independent where Britain’s core national interests are concerned?

In one sense, what does Britain have to lose from exploring deeper economic ties with China? The Biden administration has made clear there will be no trade deal with the U.S. anytime soon and, besides, the EU continues to pursue its own policy of engagement with China, despite continuing Chinese economic support for Russia during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rationale that long drove British policy is reasserting itself: The size and wealth of China means Britain simply cannot afford not to engage. With Britain outside the EU, economic growth sluggish, debt high, and few other obvious alternatives to increase trade, will any future prime minister really be able to ignore what China has to offer?

[Michael Schuman: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Britain’s apparent return to a more open China policy is a reminder of the difficulty Washington is going to have constructing and leading any kind of alliance—democratic or otherwise—to contain Beijing. Though it can use a policy of maximum pressure to force some countries into line, as it did with Britain over 5G—effectively removing London’s ability to sustain an independent policy—such a stance can go only so far. The U.S. remains powerful enough that its sticks can and do work, but without any carrots at all, this strategy will have limits.

Perhaps the main lesson of Britain’s experience with China is that core national interests are likely to reassert themselves in the long term, no matter which party, prime minister, chancellor, or president is in power in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In London, Johnson has pursued a policy that would have been familiar to any of the previous four British prime ministers this century, Labour and Conservative among them. The same is true of the EU. Such is the depth of economic entanglement with China today that it will take far more than talk of “democratic alliances” and threats to the rules-based order for Brussels, Berlin, Paris—and London—to seriously change course.

What does that mean for the U.S.? If it wants to construct a coalition behind its attempt to contain China, it will need to be prepared to threaten and cajole, yes, but also bribe far more effectively than it has until now. No longer is America the only dog in the pound, even if it still has the biggest bark.

The old saying is “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” But that’s not quite true. Democrats wait for a dream candidate to come along—a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama—and they go out of their minds with excitement and ardor. But when they don’t find one, they kiss a frog and wait to see what happens. Then they stand at the altar wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into, the church doors swing open, and Michael Dukakis walks down the aisle.

It’s a pattern I’ve watched Democrats enact my whole life: Terrible Candidate/Important Election. It’s the opposite of a Hail Mary pass. It’s an Act of Contrition. Bless me father for I have sinned: I played John Kerry at wide receiver.

So here we are, with Donald Trump rattling his cage and Ron DeSantis emerging as Florida’s Duke of Wellington. Who knows what other rough beast could be slouching toward Iowa to be caucused. And Democrats? They’ve got a good man who’s a terrible candidate, and getting worse by the week.

My first experience with TC/IE took place when I was 10. The big one: 1972, McGovern versus Nixon. I grew up in Berkeley, California, and I never once saw a Nixon bumper sticker; every single car, including our own, had a McGovern sticker. He was going to be an excellent president because he was going to stop the war in Vietnam. One afternoon, looking out the car window at a sea of McGovern signs, I asked my mother if she thought Nixon would get any votes at all, and she said, “Oh, honey, he’s going to win.”

What? I was in a fifth-grade blue bubble and hadn’t even known it.

I know my mother was trying to prepare me, but how do you prepare a 10-year-old for Election Night, 1972? Even my own parents seemed unprepared for Nixon to carpet-bomb 49 states. I was allowed to stay up to watch the results come in. “Oof,” my father said every time another state went to Nixon. “Oof” or “A body blow.” Wednesday would be a day of healing.  

As bad as the defeat was, it came with a moral clarity—only strengthened over the decades—that that war was a travesty. It made the Iraq War look like the landing at Normandy. It seemed to me, in my childish apprehension of things, that this was what it meant to be a Democrat: that even in loss you had the consolation of knowing that your candidate was right and just, and that however small your part had been, you had aligned yourself with the thrilling possibility of justice.

Travel with me now to a Long Island living room, where 12 orders of kung pao chicken are slowly congealing and Walter Mondale is getting shellacked. It was the first election I was old enough to vote in, and I’d gone back to my parents’ town to watch the outcome. Mondale did not run on ending a terrible war. He ran on a nuclear freeze, the Equal Rights Amendment, and cutting the deficit. Feel the excitement? Ronald Reagan was 17 years older than Mondale, but he always looked fantastic. You’d spend hours fuming about all the rat-bastard things he was doing to the country, and then catch a glimpse of him on television and think, But for some reason, I kind of like that guy.

Mondale barely squeaked out a win in his home state of Minnesota. It wasn’t exactly heartbreaking to watch him lose; it was mostly a sense of confusion. Where did they find this guy? The prospect of waiting up to watch Mondale give a concession speech was heinous; his whole campaign had been a concession speech. Everyone left early; no one took home any kung pao chicken.

One thing was very clear to me after that election: What we needed was charisma. What we got was Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis said he was going to “rekindle the American spirit of invention and daring,” but he wasn’t a rekindling kind of guy; he was a let’s make sure this campfire is fully doused kind of guy. He said he would save us from “the limited ambitions” of the Reagan administration. The whole problem with the Reagan administration was that its ambitions were limitless. He was probably hindered by the dumbest fact about American politics: We usually choose the taller guy, and Dukakis was 5 foot 8.

Exciting interlude: Bill Clinton! Finally, some relief. Sex appeal, competence, Fleetwood Mac, and two terms. Also the 1994 crime bill, which accelerated mass incarceration, so—like every single president before and after—he left a complicated record.

John Kerry. That was the election when I finally realized that either the Democratic Party was high or I was. You could not imagine a more unelectable person. Kerry came back from a four-month hitch in Vietnam convinced that American war crimes were widespread, largely covered up, and encouraged by the officers who sent men into battle. He became the spokesman for a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and in a Senate hearing he described a recent meeting in which members talked about things that they had done: “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” He said that the men sent to Vietnam had been given the chance to die for the “biggest nothing in history.” The next day he took part in the most powerful anti-war protest of that era, and perhaps of any era, in which veterans stood outside the Capitol and hurled their medals and service ribbons back at the government that had awarded them. One man threw his cane over the fence.

It was one of many turning points in the anti-war movement. But it came with a steep cost, perhaps steeper than Kerry realized. When he testified, there were still American POWs in Vietnam. He implied that war crimes weren’t rare and terrible events but everyday occurrences. He dishonored 2.5 million servicemembers. No one who does that can ever become commander in chief.

I mean, isn’t that freaking obvious?

The one good thing about Kerry was that he represented rock bottom. It would be impossible to nominate another candidate so clearly bound to fail as John Kerry.

I speak too soon.

Hillary Clinton was the subject of decades of intense and volatile rage, much of which was directed at her by misogynists and lunatics. But to paraphrase Michael Jordan, misogynists and lunatics vote, too.

When she delivered her concession speech the day after the election—she’d had to pull herself together the night before—she seemed to be in a state of shock, and to feel somewhat culpable for what had happened to America. (Not an entirely misplaced emotion; there are at least 10 nonstops a day from New York to Michigan.)

In the speech, she repeated one of the big lines of her campaign: that someday we would elect a woman president and break “the tallest, hardest glass ceiling.” Did she honestly think that a rich white woman who had gone to Wellesley and Yale would have an inherently harder time of becoming president than any Black man in America?

She did. The problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was Hillary Clinton.

Joe Biden announced his first presidential campaign in June of 1987, a few weeks before my first wedding. We both experienced a long streak of summer richness and promise, but by September the honeymoons were over. I had traded the bridal registry at B. Altmam’s for a classroom in Metairie, Louisiana, and five sections of high-school English; Biden’s campaign had blown up in an astonishing plagiarism scandal.

In an early primary debate, Bided had lifted—almost word for word—a speech off a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock. This included telling the audience that he was the first person in his family to go to college in “a thousand generations,” (taking the lineage back to Cro-Magnon Biden) and that he came from a family of coal miners. That no one in his family had worked in a mine, and that there were college graduates on his mother’s side of the family, were the least of his problems. Someone working for his rival for the nomination, Dukakis (remember him?), sent reporters a tape of the two men making their almost identical speeches, and the scandal kept growing from there.

It turned out that, in various speeches, Biden had lifted passages from Robert F. Kennedy and at least one line from John F. Kennedy (and not an obscure one, a greatest hit: “Each generation of Americans has been summoned,” which is the kind of thing you can say when you yourself have been summoned to defend the free world, not to take a summer lifeguard job in Delaware). He’d also lifted lines from some of Hubert Humphrey’s speeches. In that pre-internet era, it took a few days for reporters to find all of these quotations, but then there was a grand finale: In law school, he’d been assigned to write a 15-page paper, five pages of which turned out to have been plagiarized. He then held a press conference.

The goal of the press conference was to clear all of this up, and the effect of the press conference was to make viewers think that Joe Biden was a big dummy: “I’ve done some dumb things, and I’ll do some dumb things again. I’ve done some dumb things as a senator. I’ve done some dumb things as a lawyer. So, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done something very dumb.” To my knowledge, it’s the only instance of a “Dumber days ahead” speech, and on that point alone it’s engaging. What Biden wanted America to know was that, yes, of course, he was a doer of dumb things, but he was basically a nice guy.

His approach to the problem was to address not the question of why he’d done these things, but rather how he’d done them. On the law-school paper: “I took the cases out of the Law Review article and the footnotes out of the Law Review article—and I honestly thought what I was doing was the right way of doing it—and the representation of what the cases said from the Law Review article. And then at the end of the Law Review article when they set out and said, ‘This is what all this means,’ I wrote that in my paper—and I footnoted it! I footnoted the Law Review article! I used, in a 15-page paper, I used five pages”—he holds his hand up, fingers splayed: five—“of the Law Review article.” He seemed to genuinely believe that this one footnote was a mark in his favor, not the clue that led the reader straight to the article he’d copied.

Regarding his speeches, he wanted the reporters to understand that “I don’t write speeches; I do them.”

Huh?

“I do them on the backs of envelopes,” he said, and for a moment you thought you might be about to board a train hurtling toward Gettysburg, but instead he explained the series of events that led to his lifting Neil Kinnock’s speech for his closing argument in the debate.

He said that the day before the debate, he’d realized that “I didn’t have a close.” He said, “Usually what I do, as you’ve observed, is I wait for the debate to go on and see where the debate takes us. So, to make an appropriate close, not some canned thing.” This would seem to obviate the need for coming up with a close, but when he got to Iowa, the need for one was pressing. “So I’m getting in the car, and there’s a young man named David Wilhelm who runs my campaign. And I said, ‘David, I don’t have a close.’ He says, ‘Well, we prepared you seven or eight closes!’ And I said, ‘I don’t agree with any of ’em. They don’t have any feeling to ’em. And he says, ‘Well, why don’t you do what you did on the Kinnock thing; that expresses what you mean.’ And I said, ‘You’re right!’ And I said, ‘Thinking about it—that applies to me!’ And that’s honest to God what happened—we were riding over in the van. And I mean I said that to my—” Here he seems to be getting ready to say “I said that to myself,” but then catches himself. “I mean I said that to him.”

It is at this point that we get the full Biden, because he turns to the side and asks an aide, “Was he in the van?” There’s a beat, presumably long enough for some panicked underling to mime Fuck if I know! And then Biden says, “I think he was.”

The entire point of this illustration is to tell us about a particular conversation with a particular person in a particular van, and a sentence later he tells us he doesn’t know if that person was even in the van. But God love him, he kind of sells it.

Much of the criticism lately of President Biden’s apparent senescence is based on something that happens to many old people: Age is determined to be the cause of some peculiar habit of behavior or thought, when in fact that habit has been with the person throughout his life. A lot of what people are calling the “gaffes” of old age are just Joe Biden. He’s a bullshitter, a teller of tall tales. His method has always been to give informal speeches that are discursive, anecdote-laden, in which the editing process takes place in real time. His classic move is to turn a forensic intelligence on the unimportant part of a situation and then to gloss over—or skip entirely—the main point. Barack Obama is said to have observed that it’s impossible to overestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, and in large part that has to do with the endless, improvisational talking. But that gabbing is also the reason he was so effective at getting people to consider changing their votes when he was a senator and then the vice president. He doesn’t use verbal communication as a means of transmitting facts. He uses it to bond with someone. Talking is a kind of lubricant, easing people along to a new point of view—at the very, very least, you know that if you agree to change your vote, he might stop talking. He doesn’t hold grudges, he doesn’t shit-talk, and he tends to see the best in others.

It’s just that, as he ages, the whole system is slowing down, and his ability to bounce his way through gaffes and to revise stories in the midst of telling them (“Was he in the van? I think he was”) is diminishing. In the 1987 press conference, you can watch him remember that Anwar Sadat is dead halfway through saying the words “Anwar Sadat,” but he finesses it and keeps on rolling.

If Joe Biden had been the nominee in 2016 instead of Hillary Clinton, Trump would never have been elected. People didn’t hate Joe Biden back then. But now, for a dozen reasons—many of them not his fault—regard for him has plummeted.  

In the early decades of the last century, a Viennese surgeon named Eugen Steinach claimed that he could restore the virility of old men by grafting tissue from monkey glands onto their testes. The procedure was later modified to one that left the animal kingdom undisturbed and was essentially just a partial vasectomy. Sigmund Freud underwent the procedure, as did William Butler Yeats (in Ireland it earned him the nickname “The Gland Old Man”). They both raved about the results, which in and of itself is testament to the fantastical imaginings of old men.

Old men dream of youth and often embarrass themselves in its pursuit. Many younger people in the Democratic Party seem to think Joe Biden’s already out the door. Gavin Newsom isn’t just measuring for curtains, he’s packing the U-Haul. But Biden’s never been a quitter, and his great optimism has helped him survive the tragedies that have befallen him. He very well might want to run again, which would be a disaster.

In the middle of his second term, Barack Obama invited Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the White House for lunch. His plan was to gently suggest the possibility of her retiring before he left office, so that there would be no chance of her seat going to a conservative. She was then 85 and had had cancer five times. Nothing doing. She stayed right where she was, and soon enough we got Amy Coney Barrett.

Have you ever had to take the keys away from an old relative? It’s not easy. Sometimes you give up the fight to keep the peace. And then you hope against hope that everything will be all right.  

Every organization devoted to mass death needs a charmless, bespectacled, blank-eyed chief operating officer who inspires no one but keeps the gears of murder turning. Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s Himmler. President Biden and most Americans will see his death as just revenge for the three thousand innocents killed by Al Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001—and so it is. But I have to admit that Zawahiri’s end leaves me cold. Revenge is sour because it always comes too late. Three thousand to one: the numbers provide no comfort.

And think of Zawahiri’s other victims. Most of them were Muslims whose names are not carved in stone. It’s staggering to think how many human beings are no longer alive because this doctor from a prosperous Egyptian family embraced a hateful ideology that licensed him to kill. There was Shayma Abdel Halim, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, killed in 1993 in a Cairo suburb by a car bomb that Islamic Jihad, a terror group that Zawahiri later merged into Al Qaeda, intended for an Egyptian prime minister. There were the hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians murdered in Al Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998.

Remember the tens of thousands of Iraqis, most of them Shia, blown to pieces, shot to death, or beheaded by Al Qaeda’s local affiliate. At one point Al Qaeda in Iraq went on a killing spree of bakers in Baghdad. The body count in Iraq grew so high that Zawahiri worried it might hurt Al Qaeda’s image among the world’s Muslims. Think of all the Afghans, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Australians, Turkish, Spanish, British, Moroccans, Syrians, Malians, and others who perished in all the suicide bombings and executions carried out over the past quarter century with Zawahiri’s approval. Perhaps one day the names will be recorded in a memorial or museum or database somewhere, under a heading that says: “Ayman al-Zawahiri’s victims.”

In another ledger are the names of all the people killed in the wars America started with the stated purpose of eliminating Zawahiri’s organization—morally not equivalent, but just as surely dead. I don’t know how to weigh the balance and come up with a final reckoning, but I know that this revenge is sour. It’s particularly sour when you think about the circumstances of Zawahiri’s death. He was killed by a drone strike while standing on the balcony of a house in Sherpur, an upscale Kabul neighborhood that Afghanistan’s corrupt rulers have long called home. Apparently, Zawahiri had been in Kabul for several weeks, in violation of the Taliban’s pledge not to host terrorists. The deal leading to the departure of the last U.S. troops was signed and executed with lies and self-delusions.

Zawahiri is dead. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are back in business running Afghanistan, eliminating opponents and erasing women with the ideology that, three decades ago, gave Zawahiri the right to kill an 11-year-old schoolgirl. Americans might feel safer—might even feel a measure of satisfaction. The least we can do is spare a thought for everyone else.

Ahmed Lamlas, the governor of Aden, had been cheerfully describing his progress in rebuilding Yemen’s interim capital—a program aiming to ensure that most cars in the city had license plates was under way, and Saudi-funded projects to rebuild a hospital and dig new water wells were moving forward—when the power went out, plunging the dilapidated conference room into darkness.

“This,” a Yemeni sitting with our small group interjected sarcastically, “is one of the accomplishments.”

Aden is known as the Eye of Yemen, the gateway through which foreign ideas and would-be conquerors enter the country. This southern port city spent more than a century under British rule, connecting London’s imperial possessions in Egypt and India. It fell within the Soviet sphere of influence following the collapse of the British empire, becoming the capital of the Middle East’s only communist state. Now it is under the sway of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and at the center of their efforts to drive back the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia, in Yemen’s long-running civil war.

Even though the Houthis were driven out of Aden seven years ago, it looks as if fighting ended seven days ago. Houses lie in rubble across the city; Lamlas had only enough funds to remove debris from one of eight municipal districts. Across the street from where I stayed, the Aden Hotel—once known for hosting lavish weddings—was half-collapsed from shelling years prior that had left gaping wounds in its facade. Lamlas mused about putting up billboards to boost the morale of citizens frustrated by the slow pace of reconstruction, but as he himself acknowledged, his entire budget would not cover repairs to the Aden Hotel. In November, Yemen’s prime minister promised to repair a single power generator. It remains broken. “We are poor,” Lamlas said simply.

Lamlas’s matter-of-fact comment to me, if anything, understates the despair in Aden, and in Yemen. No one involved in Yemen’s war, at any level, has any significant aspiration for the country. Hopes—to the extent that any exist—are limited to improving the odds of surviving. In Yemen, in Saudi Arabia and the UAE (the dominant powers in non-Houthi areas), in the United States, there is no discussion of how to rebuild Yemen, let alone how to make it thrive as it once did. The grandiose ambitions of the war’s major players were dashed long ago, and yet the conflict still grinds on, leaving a country ruined. The war has created its own logic and its own momentum.

Two weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden described the war here as a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” He had good reason: The Saudi-led air campaign has killed at least 9,000 civilians and precipitated the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, while also failing to dislodge the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Aden, meanwhile, has seen its economy and security collapse under the rule of Saudi- and Emirati-backed politicians.

The Yemeni government’s poverty has made it dependent on handouts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In return, it has ceded no small amount of sovereignty. Ships hoping to dock at Aden’s harbor must first undergo inspection by the Saudi-led Coalition, primarily by passing through the Saudi city of Jeddah, and the decision to grant a foreign journalist like me a visa had to be approved by officials in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. (The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, an independent research institution focused on Yemen and funded by grants from the EU and European states, organized the trip and handled these negotiations.) Even Yemen’s airspace is no longer its own: Our flight to Aden sat on the runway for seven hours, waiting for approval from the Saudi-led coalition to take off.

Yemenis deeply resent this dependency. “This is bullshit,” one fellow passenger yelled as our wait dragged on. “Someone call [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman!”

The country’s horizons were not always so limited. Some Adenis still remember when the city was the Dubai of its era, prospering from its global commercial links in the dying days of the British empire. Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1954, less than a year after her coronation, hailing the city as an “outstanding example of colonial development.” Decades later, a Yemeni hotel still promoted the legend that she had spent a night in one of its rooms, decking out a “Royal Suite” with photographs of Her Majesty.

If I had visited in the 1950s or ’60s, one older Adeni told me, the bombed-out Aden Hotel would not have been the central landmark in the neighborhood in which I stayed. Instead, I would have seen a neon-lit cinema, the Shenaz, that played that era’s biggest English-language blockbusters, including Ben Hur and Cleopatra. Next door was an adjoining night club, the Shalimar, which imported international bands and German beer. The Shenaz was partially destroyed in the mid-2000s during a property dispute and now sits derelict. The Shalimar has been demolished.

“It was an era where going out was something you did with a bit of aplomb,” Dadi Motiwalla, the eldest son of the Shenaz and Shalimar’s owner, told me. “If you didn’t have a tie or a bow tie, we wouldn’t let you in.”

A hotel damaged by the war, in Aden, Yemen, Feb. 15, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

This was once a vital city, Adenis wanted me to know, connected to global commerce and culture. It was a place where one’s aspirations could extend beyond cleaning the streets of rubble. Motiwalla described having his birthdays at the Shalimar: large parties with more than 100 children scrambling around the dance floor, and the chefs making cakes with sugary lakes and toy boats floating upon them.

The cinema’s theme song, he remembers, was “Sail Along Silvery Moon.” “I never forgot that,” he said quietly, choking up. “It brings a lot of memories back.”

Nobody is trying to restore Aden to what it once was. Yemen’s leaders aspire only to hold on to power so that they can wring the few remaining dollars out of state coffers. The wealthy Gulf states involved in Yemen’s war seem only to want the government to limp along ineffectually until they can extricate themselves from the conflict. And the United States’ primary concerns are counterterrorism and the maintenance of its security relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

There was a time when Saudi leaders imagined that they would swoop in as Yemen’s savior. Mohammed bin Salman launched Riyadh’s military campaign against the Houthis a mere two months after he was appointed defense minister, and the 2015 intervention became integral to the young prince’s rise to power. He argued privately that the kingdom’s old guard—including his chief rival, then–Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef—had failed to stop the Houthis’ rapid gains across Yemen in the preceding year. It now fell to him to take the sort of bold actions that his elders refused to contemplate. The Houthis, and by extension Iran, had to be stopped.

MBS cultivated an image of himself as a decisive, dynamic military leader. The kingdom’s official news agency published photographs of the prince flying on a military helicopter to inspect army positions near the Yemeni border, and Saudi television broadcast clips of him overseeing the campaign’s first air strikes from an air-force operations center. He claimed that the Saudi-led coalition could “uproot” the Houthis “in a few days” if it chose to do so, and posters touting him as a military leader proliferated across Riyadh.

By 2019, however, the Saudis had what one analyst described to me as a “come to Jesus” moment about the war’s trajectory. Their military campaign had stalled, their local allies were weakened, and Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi territory were becoming deadlier. MBS, now firmly ensconced as crown prince, stepped back as the public face of the war and charged his younger brother with negotiating an end to the conflict with the Houthis.

That diplomatic opening paved the way in April of this year for the first nationwide truce since 2016 in Yemen’s war. Although the agreement has resulted in a notable decline in violence, U.S. diplomats acknowledge that it does not address the root causes driving the war. Fundamental questions about how to share political power and rebuild the country’s shattered institutions remain unresolved. The current diplomatic goal is to freeze the conflict in place, in the hope that this will open the door to broader political negotiations.

For many people whom I spoke with in Yemen, however, that risks simply freezing their lives in an impossible situation. In an encampment overlooking an abandoned stretch of Aden’s beachfront, for example, a community of Ethiopian refugees has suffered multiple displacements, by multiple tormentors: First they were driven from their home country by ethnic conflict there, then out of Sanaa by the Houthis, and finally they were dumped in Aden and forced to fashion shelters out of tree branches and roadside debris.

Internally displaced–persons camp in Modereyet el-Shaab, Aden, Yemen, Feb. 9, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Beyza, 22, remembers only life in Yemen. She and her mother fled across the Red Sea in 2004, settling in Sanaa when her mother found work cleaning houses there. After the Houthi takeover of the capital, however, the Islamist movement came to see the Ethiopian community as a humanitarian burden and, later, as transmitters of the coronavirus. Beginning in 2020, the Houthis began sending refugees on forced marches to the Saudi border and locked up others in detention facilities.

When refugees protested against their dismal conditions in the detention center, Houthi fighters locked the facility doors and launched projectiles inside that ignited a raging fire. International organizations reported that scores of people burned to death; the refugees in Aden insisted to me that the true death toll was in the hundreds. A tattered poster featuring gruesome images of the fire’s aftermath and demanding justice for the victims still hangs outside the encampment I visited.

The community launched protests outside the United Nations refugee agency’s headquarters in Sanaa to demand support for the families of those who died. The Houthis, unwilling to condone even this minor expression of dissent, came for the protesters at dawn on a Friday morning. “They took everyone,” Beyza told me. “Those who could pay 2,000 Saudi rials [$533], they took to the passport center. If they didn’t pay, they took them to the front line.”

Beyza and her mother handed over their meager savings to the Houthis. From the passport center, they were placed on buses and transported out of the group’s territory to Aden. “They took our photos and said, ‘If you come back to Sanaa, you will be killed,’” said Beyza. “Some people’s children were still in Sanaa, and they couldn’t go back for them.”

In Aden, the beleaguered Ethiopian community now suffers more from neglect than abuse. Its members had to construct their own rudimentary shelters, and say they received little to no humanitarian assistance from the Yemeni government or international organizations. They beg for food at nearby restaurants and gather water from a broken pipe at a nearby derelict hotel.

Abandonment, too, can be deadly. One 33-year-old Ethiopian, Jawar, told me how his seven-month-old son fell ill and died due to the lack of basic medicine. He could not find anywhere to bury him, so he pleaded with a guard at the nearby hotel to lay his son to rest in the garden.

“This is what it is like here,” Jawar said quietly. “Children are born, and children die.”

Photographs of severely malnourished infants hung on wall in the administrative office at the Aden Hospital, in Yemen, Feb. 13, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Eight years into this conflict, any hope of a decisive victory has vanished. Many Adenis I interviewed have grown cynical about the point of this seemingly pointless war: It only continues, they say, to justify a small elite’s grip on power and continued looting of state coffers.

I have been covering and studying this war—first from Beirut, then from Riyadh, and now from Washington, D.C.—since its inception and, frankly, that explanation is as good as any. The Gulf Arab states have abandoned the pretense that they will deal a death blow to Iranian expansionism; MBS has secured his position in the Saudi hierarchy; the Houthis’ boasts that they would win a swift victory over their foes have been proved false. What better reasoning can I put forward than that proffered to me by those Adenis?

Last year, retired Brigadier General Naji al-Arabi found himself leading a group of angry protesters massed outside Aden’s presidential palace. Inside, Yemeni leaders were meeting. As the protesters approached, the soldiers at the gate fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. The demonstrators, many of them military veterans like Arabi, didn’t back down: They surged forward toward the entrance, and after a brief scuffle the guards stepped aside and allowed them to enter the palace.

“We didn’t know the government was having an emergency meeting,” Arabi told me. “We just heard the helicopters flying away.”

The Yemeni government fled shortly after the palace gates were breached. The protesters soon departed peacefully, returning to a nearby mosque to read their list of demands, calling on the government to improve the dismal living conditions in the city. It made little difference: An atmosphere of imminent collapse and simmering revolt still hangs over Aden.

Wedding dresses on display in Lelte boutique on a street in Aden, Yemen, Feb. 15, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Arabi, a blunt man who wears a perpetually exasperated expression, joined the army in 1978. He trained in the Soviet Union for three years until being forced into retirement in the ’90s, after the unification of South Yemen and North Yemen. He and thousands of his comrades now survive on their pensions: Arabi is owed roughly $30 a month.

But even this paltry sum comes in rarely. In 2016, Arabi and fellow ex-soldiers formed a protest movement to pressure the government to pay its debts to veterans. Since the protesters breached the palace, Arabi says he has not received a cent.

Arabi has eight children who depend on his pension for their survival. Some of his sons now chop wood to make ends meet during the long stretches when the money does not arrive. Many well-trained military officers have similarly been forced to scratch out a living by whatever means necessary. “You can find a fighter pilot watching over sheep, or selling newspapers or cigarettes,” Arabi said.

In addition to pressuring the government and its foreign patrons, the protest movement is a way for officers like Arabi to maintain some influence over the thousands of desperate ex-soldiers abandoned by the Yemeni state. Arabi fears that, without any way of supporting themselves, some of his former comrades could drift into Islamist militancy or work for criminal gangs to earn a living. In fact, he believes that the government is hoping they do, as it would then have a pretext to crack down violently on the protest movement.

“We think the government is trying to repress us so that people will use their weapons to sabotage and to steal,” he said. “They are trying to create new front lines to keep the war going, to feed on it.”

The movement has sputtered in recent months, however, as its members grow further impoverished. Arabi admitted that it has become difficult to persuade veterans to bear the costs of leaving their home in the countryside to travel to Aden for protests. With their pensions gone, members are devoting their energies to simply surviving. If Yemen’s leaders hope to silence the protest movement by starving it of resources, as Arabi believes, they may soon get their wish. But it will be a pyrrhic victory.

Arabi and his fellow soldiers will not be the last victims of Yemen’s collapse. Spend any time at all in Aden, and you will find a whole new generation furious at the impossibility of building a life here: There are the medical students without textbooks or functional internet, the psychiatrist specializing in conflict trauma who had his desk taken away by university administrators, and the government official who works from home because heavily armed men occupy his office. The list goes on.

If you listen to diplomats, this moment constitutes a hopeful one for Yemen. The truce is for the most part holding, in no small part because of coordination between U.S. and Saudi diplomats. When it was renewed in June, Biden praised Saudi Arabia’s “courageous” diplomatic efforts. His administration is now trying to leverage its ties with the Saudis to forge a permanent peace agreement.

For residents of Aden, however, international diplomacy often seems divorced from the daily struggles of life. So much has already been lost. What remains feels ephemeral. And there is only one employer that is always hiring.

Standing in the courtyard of the University of Aden, I asked a medical student what would happen if he couldn’t find work after graduation. “There’s always the war,” he said. “You can make 1,000 Saudi rials [$266] each month as a fighter.”

In Aden, your salary and savings can shrink to nothing; your physical security can be threatened at a whim; even electricity is fleeting. But the front line is a constant, fixed reality, and it’s not going anywhere.

Aden port, before sunrise, Yemen, Feb. 18, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

The Biden administration and many commentators are at pains to deny that the U.S. is in a recession, but history is not on their side.

Every organization devoted to mass death needs a charmless, bespectacled, blank-eyed chief operating officer who inspires no one but keeps the gears of murder turning. Ayman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden’s Himmler. President Biden and most Americans will see his death as just revenge for the three thousand innocents killed by Al Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001—and so it is. But I have to admit that Zawahiri’s end leaves me cold. Revenge is sour because it always comes too late. Three thousand to one: the numbers provide no comfort.

And think of Zawahiri’s other victims. Most of them were Muslims whose names are not carved in stone. It’s staggering to think how many human beings are no longer alive because this doctor from a prosperous Egyptian family embraced a hateful ideology that licensed him to kill. There was Shayma Abdel Halim, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, killed in 1993 in a Cairo suburb by a car bomb that Islamic Jihad, a terror group that Zawahiri later merged into Al Qaeda, intended for an Egyptian prime minister. There were the hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians murdered in Al Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998.

Remember the tens of thousands of Iraqis, most of them Shia, blown to pieces, shot to death, or beheaded by Al Qaeda’s local affiliate. At one point Al Qaeda in Iraq went on a killing spree of bakers in Baghdad. The body count in Iraq grew so high that Zawahiri worried it might hurt Al Qaeda’s image among the world’s Muslims. Think of all the Afghans, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Australians, Turkish, Spanish, British, Moroccans, Syrians, Malians, and others who perished in all the suicide bombings and executions carried out over the past quarter century with Zawahiri’s approval. Perhaps one day the names will be recorded in a memorial or museum or database somewhere, under a heading that says: “Ayman al-Zawahiri’s victims.”

In another ledger are the names of all the people killed in the wars America started with the stated purpose of eliminating Zawahiri’s organization—morally not equivalent, but just as surely dead. I don’t know how to weigh the balance and come up with a final reckoning, but I know that this revenge is sour. It’s particularly sour when you think about the circumstances of Zawahiri’s death. He was killed by a drone strike while standing on the balcony of a house in Sherpur, an upscale Kabul neighborhood that Afghanistan’s corrupt rulers have long called home. Apparently, Zawahiri had been in Kabul for several weeks, in violation of the Taliban’s pledge not to host terrorists. The deal leading to the departure of the last U.S. troops was signed and executed with lies and self-delusions.

Zawahiri is dead. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are back in business running Afghanistan, eliminating opponents and erasing women with the ideology that, three decades ago, gave Zawahiri the right to kill an 11-year-old schoolgirl. Americans might feel safer—might even feel a measure of satisfaction. The least we can do is spare a thought for everyone else.

The drone strike had been planned for weeks, according to a senior administration official, and included a scale model of al-Zawahri’s house in Kabul.