Their bid is expected to face competition from other potential hosts such as Brazil and a trio of European nations.

Ahead of an expected vote, the United States says it does not support an immediate ceasefire in Israel-Hamas war.

The first sound in Hayao Miyazaki’s new movie, The Boy and the Heron, is an air-raid siren, heard over a screen of black that quickly explodes into tumult and destruction. It’s 1943, and a firebombing has set a Tokyo hospital ablaze, killing the mother of 12-year-old Mahito Maki, the movie’s protagonist. Miyazaki depicts the incident with nightmarish bluntness: Mahito running toward the building, then being held back as flames consume the entire screen, overwhelming any chance of saving his mother.

The death is a moment of shocking reality from a filmmaker and an animator who, for decades, has blurred real life with fantasy, building a reputation as one of cinema’s foremost masters of dreamlike imagery. The scene also has a jarringly autobiographical edge: Although Miyazaki’s mother did not perish in World War II, his early childhood was defined by the conflict, and he had to evacuate his home at the age of 3 when it was bombed by the United States. The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki’s first film in 10 years, and given his age—he’s 82—it could be his cinematic swan song (though he has proved extremely good at failing to retire). But what’s most stunning is how ambitious its storytelling feels. Even now, the Studio Ghibli co-founder is finding new ways into his narratives.

Most of the movie’s first half is solidly planted on the ground: After the death of his mother, Mahito moves to a sparsely habited countryside estate with his father, who has married his mother’s younger sister. There, he struggles to get used to his relationship with his “new mother,” Natsuko; is bullied at school; and is fussed over by a group of comically elderly maids (the one element in the film’s early acts that feels like classic Miyazaki). The melancholy tone of these scenes resembles the opening act of My Neighbor Totoro, probably Miyazaki’s best-known work, which also follows children exploring bucolic bits of nature while wrestling with the absence of a parent.

In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito does not meet delightful woodland sprites; instead, he crosses paths with a menacing gray heron who speaks to him in a guttural growl and challenges him to explore a crumbling tower on the estate’s grounds. Once there, the story shifts into something more typical for Miyazaki, as Mahito enters a fantasy world where, the heron asserts, he may be able to see his mother again. When he begins to navigate a dreamscape filled with talking birds, shifting landscapes, and mysterious, ghostly creatures, it’d be easy to think the film was about to settle into recognizable whimsy.

Not so much. The Boy and the Heron trades in all of the imagery Miyazaki excels at, but uses it to tell a darker tale of love and loss. While Mahito moves from realm to realm, he’s both helped and opposed by the heron, who turns out to be a gnomish creature of mischief wearing an elaborate costume. The dreamy logic of the film often feels out of control: Mahito is with a warrior pirate queen at one moment, then contending with a host of marshmallow-shaped bubble creatures who supposedly represent unborn human souls, then doing battle with a kingdom of giant parakeets. And he’s sometimes accompanied by a young magical woman named Himi, whose purpose seems intentionally opaque.

[Read: Watching Spirited Away Again, and Again]

For a good chunk of the film, it’s hard to know if all of these disparate threads will come together. Miyazaki’s previous film, 2013’s fantastic The Wind Rises, was also one of his most mundane works, a loose biography of the inventor of Japan’s Zero warplanes, which formed the backbone of the country’s World War II air force. Perhaps, I thought, The Boy and the Heron would end up feeling like a counterpart—an inscrutable storm of strangeness to follow that sobering realism. But at the end, the puzzle pieces begin to come together. Himi’s identity becomes clearer, and Mahito’s true mission in this dimension is revealed: to meet its inventor, a wizened old man wrestling with the legacy of the place he’s created.

It’s easy to say that this “Granduncle,” with his tangled gray hair and thousand-yard stare, is Miyazaki himself—an old master reckoning with what he’s going to leave behind. (The inclusion mirrors Martin Scorsese’s self-insertion at the end of Killers of the Flower Moon, where he openly reflected on the purpose of telling true-crime stories for an audience’s entertainment.) I’ve been pondering other readings, but whether or not the director is drawing himself on-screen, it eventually becomes obvious what The Boy and the Heron is about: the ways we come to terms with loss, and how best to think about the memories that arrive after a great departure. What’s important is that the film is alive and awake with energy. This is no marble mausoleum of a movie—it’s more of a bold reinvention than a somber farewell.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.

But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.

Trump now nurses deep grudges against these officers and civilians, who slow-rolled and smothered his various illegal and autocratic impulses, including his enraged demand to kill the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and his desire to deploy America’s military against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

The 2020 election, of course, is the source of Trump’s chief grudge against senior military leaders. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was especially determined to keep the armed forces out of the various schemes to stay in office devised by the Trump team and its allies, including a delusional plan, proposed by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, to have the military go into swing states and seize voting machines. Trump has since implied (in response to a profile of Milley by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) that Milley should get the death penalty. Milley reportedly believes that Trump, if reelected, will try to jail him and other senior national-security figures, a concern shared by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

[From the November 2023 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on how Mark Milley held the line]

In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Publicly, Trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.

On November 9, 2020, Trump dumped Esper and named Christopher Miller, a retired colonel and Pentagon bureaucrat, as acting secretary of defense. Miller took along Kash Patel, a Trump sycophant, as his chief of staff. Trump sent Douglas Macgregor, another retired colonel and a pro-Russia Fox News regular, to Miller as a senior adviser. (Earlier, Trump had attempted and failed to make Macgregor the ambassador to Germany.) Trump installed Anthony Tata—a retired one-star Army general who has claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that a former CIA director was trying to have Trump assassinated—in the third-most-senior job at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, the Senate had wisely declined to confirm Tata’s appointment to that position, but in November, Trump gave him the job in an acting capacity anyway.

These moves, among others, led all 10 living former secretaries of defense to issue a startling and unprecedented joint statement. On January 3, 2021, they directly enjoined Miller and his subordinates to uphold their constitutional duty and “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” The letter pointedly reminded Miller and his team that they were “bound by oath, law and precedent,” and called upon them, “in the strongest terms,” to honor “the history of democratic transition in our great country.”

If reelected, Trump would attempt to gain authoritarian control of the Defense Department’s uppermost levels from the very beginning. There are more Anthony Tatas and Douglas Macgregors out there, and Trump’s allies are likely already seeking to identify them. If the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s appointees, it wouldn’t matter much: Trump has learned that he can keep rotating people through acting positions, daring the Senate to stop him.

The career civil servants underneath these appointees—who work on everything from recruiting to nuclear planning—would disobey Trump if he attacked the constitutional order. These civilians, by law, cannot be fired at will, a problem Trump tried to remedy in the last months of his administration by proposing a new category of government appointments (Schedule F) that would have converted some of the most important civil-service positions into political appointments directly controlled by the White House. President Joe Biden immediately repealed this move after taking office, but Trump has vowed to reinstate it.

[Read: Trump’s open plot to dismantle the federal government]

In his two-pronged offensive to capture the military establishment while eviscerating the civil service, Trump would likely rely on former officers such as Miller and fringe-dwelling civilians such as Patel, but he would also almost certainly find at least a few serving senior officers—he would not need many—who would accept his offer to abandon their oath. Together, they would make a run at changing the nature of the armed forces.

This is not abstract theorizing. The Heritage Foundation recently released “Project 2025,” a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican president’s administration. The Defense Department chapter was written by none other than former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. It is mostly a rationalization for more spending, but it includes a clear call for a purge of the military’s senior ranks to clean out “Marxist indoctrination”—an accusation he does not define—along with demands for expelling trans service members and reinstating those service members who were dismissed for refusing COVID vaccinations.

The problems of ideological polarization and extremism in the armed forces are not as extensive as some critics of the military imagine, but they are more worrisome than the military leadership would like to admit. Military officers tend to be more conservative than the public, and as far back as the Clinton and Obama administrations, I occasionally heard senior officers speak of these liberal presidents in deeply contemptuous terms (potentially a crime under military regulations). Today, military bases are subjected to a constant barrage of Fox News in almost every area with a television, and toward the end of my teaching career (I retired in 2022), I often heard senior officers repeating almost verbatim some of the most overheated and paranoid talking points about politics and national affairs from the network’s prime-time hosts. Some of these officers would be tempted to answer Trump’s call.

The rest of the members of the professional military, despite their concerns, would likely follow their instincts and default to the orders of their chain of command. The American political system was never intended to cope with someone like Trump; the military is trained and organized to obey, not resist, the orders of the civilian commander in chief.

Trump’s plans would likely use this obedience to the chain of command to exploit an unfortunate vulnerability in the modern American armed forces: The military, in my experience, has a political-literacy problem. Too many people in uniform no longer have a basic grounding in the constitutional foundation of American government and the civil-military relationship. (Some of my colleagues who teach in senior-military educational institutions share this concern, and over the years, some of us have tried, often in vain, to push more study of the Constitution into the curricula.) These men and women are neither unintelligent nor disloyal. Rather, like many Americans, they are no longer taught basic civics, and they may struggle with the line between executing the orders of the president as the commander in chief and obeying the Constitution.

Trump’s appointees also would be able to influence the future of the armed forces through assignments and promotions (and non-promotions) within each branch—and through their behavior as examples to the rest of the military. With top cover from the White House, Trump’s functionaries in the Pentagon, working with his supporters in the ranks, could poison the military for years to come by ignoring laws, regulations, and traditions as they see fit. (Recall, for example, that Trump is an admirer of the disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and intervened to make sure Gallagher kept his SEAL Trident after he was charged with war crimes and found guilty of posing for photos with a captive’s dead body.) America’s military is built on virtues such as honor and duty, but abusing and discarding the norms that support those virtues would change the military’s culture—and faster than we may realize.

Even if only some of the actions I’ve described here succeed, any number of disasters might follow. Trump could jeopardize national security by surrounding himself with military and defense officials who would help him dissolve our alliances (especially NATO), weaken our military readiness, undermine our intelligence services, and abandon our friends around the world, all while he seeks closer relations with authoritarian regimes—especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He could issue illegal orders to engage in torture or to commit other war crimes overseas. And he could bring the entire planet to disaster should senior military leaders obey his unhinged orders to kill foreign leaders, start a war, or even use nuclear weapons.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Anne Applebaum on how Trump will abandon NATO]

At home, Trump could order unconstitutional shows of military support for his administration to intimidate his opponents. He could order American soldiers into the streets against protesters. (Trump’s allies are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day to quell any demonstrations against his return to office.) Officers refusing such orders could be dismissed or reassigned, which in turn could provoke a political confrontation between the Trump loyalists in the high command and the rest of the armed forces, itself a frightening and previously unthinkable prospect.

And if Trump succeeds in simultaneously capturing the U.S. military while gutting the other key institutions that protect democracy—especially the courts and the Justice Department—nothing will stop him from using force to put down opposition and stay in power.

Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism. The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment. But Trump and his allies understand that by leaving the military outside their political control the last time around, they also left intact a crucial bulwark against their plans. They will not make the same mistake twice.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Military Loyal to Trump.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let’s be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn’t see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.

At first, liberals tried established tactics such as sit-ins and legal challenges; lawyers and activists rallied to protest the administration’s Muslim travel ban, and courts successfully blocked its early versions. Soon, however, the sheer volume of outrages overwhelmed Trump’s critics, and the self-styled resistance settled into a pattern of high-drama, low-impact indignation.

Rather than focusing on how to oppose Trump’s policies, or how to expose the hollowness of his promises, the resistance simply wished Trump would disappear. Many on the left insisted that he wasn’t a legitimate president, and that he was only in the White House because of Russian interference. Social media made everything worse, as it always does; the resistance became the #Resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hard work of door-knocking and community activism, its members tweeted to the choir, drawing no distinction between Trump’s crackpot comments and his serious transgressions. They fantasized about a deus ex machina—impeachment, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the pee tape, outtakes from The Apprentice—leading to Trump’s removal from office, and became ever more frustrated as each successive news cycle failed to make the scales fall from his supporters’ eyes. The other side got wise to this trend, and coined a phrase to encapsulate it: “Orange Man Bad.”

The Trump presidency was a failure of right-wing elites; the Republican Party underestimated his appeal to disaffected voters and failed to find a candidate who could defeat him in the primary. Once he became president, the party establishment was content to grumble in private and grovel in public. But the Trump years demonstrated a failure of the left, too. Trump created an enormous reservoir of political energy, but that energy was too often misdirected. Many liberals turned inward, taking comfort in self-help and purification rituals. They might have to share a country with people who would vote for the Orange Man, but they could purge their Facebook feeds, friendship circles, and perhaps even workplaces of conservatives, contrarians, and the insufficiently progressive. Feeling under intense threat, they wanted everyone to pick a side on issues such as taking the Founding Fathers’ names off school buildings and giving puberty blockers to minors—and they insisted that ambivalence was not an option. (Nor was sitting out a debate, because “silence is violence.”) Any deviation from the progressive consensus was seen as a moral failing rather than a political difference.

The cataclysms of 2020—the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—might have snapped the left out of its reverie. Instead, the resisters buried their heads deeper in the sand. Health experts insisted that anyone who broke social-distancing rules was selfish, before deciding that attending protests (for causes they supported, at least) was more important than observing COVID restrictions. The summer of 2020 made a best seller out of a white woman’s book about “white fragility,” but negotiations around a comprehensive police-reform bill collapsed the following year. As conservative Supreme Court justices laid the ground for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, activist organizations became fixated on purifying their language. (By 2021, the ACLU was so far gone, it rewrote a famous Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote on abortion to remove the word woman.) Demoralized and disorganized, having given up hope of changing Trump supporters’ minds, the left flexed its muscles in the few spaces in which it held power: liberal media, publishing, academia.

[From the April 2023 issue: George Packer on the moral case against equity language]

If you attempted to criticize these tendencies, the rejoinder was simple whataboutism: Why not focus on Trump? The answer, of course, was that a bad government demands a strong opposition—one that seeks converts rather than hunting heretics. Many of the most interesting Democratic politicians to emerge during this time—the CIA veteran Abigail Spanberger, in Virginia; the Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock, in Georgia; Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who promised to “fix the damn roads”—were pragmatists who flipped red territories blue. When it came to the 2020 election, Democrats ultimately nominated the moderate candidate most likely to defeat Trump.

That Joe Biden would prevail as the party’s candidate was hardly a given, however. He defeated his more progressive rivals for the Democratic nomination only after staging a comeback in the South Carolina primary. He was 44 points ahead of his closest rival, Bernie Sanders, among the state’s Black voters, according to an exit poll. That is not a coincidence. These voters recognized that they had far more to gain from a candidate like Biden, who regularly talked about working with Republicans, than from the activist wing of the party. As Biden put it in August 2020, responding to civil unrest across American cities: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”

Biden is older now, and a second victory is far from assured. If he loses, the challenges to American democratic norms will be enormous. The withering of Twitter may impede Trump’s ability to hijack the news cycle as effectively as last time, but he’ll only be more committed to enriching himself and seeking revenge. I hope that the left has learned its lesson, and will look outward rather than inward: The battle is not for control of Bud Light’s advertising strategy, or who gets published in The New York Times, but against gerrymandering and election interference, against women being locked up for having abortions, against transgender Americans losing access to health care, against domestic abusers being able to buy guns, against police violence going unpunished, against the empowerment of white nationalists, and against book bans.

The path back to sanity in the United States lies in persuasion—in defending freedom of speech and the rule of law, in clearly and calmly opposing Trump’s abuses of power, and in offering an attractive alternative. The left cannot afford to go bonkers at the exact moment America needs it most.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Left Can’t Afford to Go Mad.”

Brilliant, witty, and ambitious, Henry Kissinger made diplomacy the stuff of unrivaled celebrity. He thrived on attention, and would have been thrilled by  the flood of coverage that marked his death last week. Whether the obituaries and commentaries put his record in a positive or negative light, almost all of them treated Kissinger as the master of events.

This may be how he wanted to be remembered, but it’s not what really happened. No matter how often Kissinger is described as the Cold War’s most powerful secretary of state and a peerless elder statesman, the truth is that his tenure was often rocky, as full of setbacks as acclaim. By the time he left government, he was viewed by many of his colleagues as a burden, not an asset. Once out of office, the advice he gave his successors was sometimes spectacularly wrong, and frequently ignored.

In President Richard Nixon’s first term, Kissinger presided over three big diplomatic transformations—withdrawal from Vietnam, the opening to China, and détente with the Soviet Union. When he became secretary of state, his policy dominance was virtually unchallenged.  He was the first (and, to this day, only) person ever to run the State Department while serving simultaneously as the president’s national security adviser. Outside of government, he enjoyed unprecedented global renown. Less than a month after his Senate confirmation, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Shan Wang: Henry Kissinger’s real legacy]

Yet when Kissinger left office barely three years later, most of his ambitious schemes were unrealized. Others had simply been rejected. On the left, many revile Kissinger for the human costs of the policies he pursued; on the right, some still admire his unsentimental use of military force. In fact, the real story of Kissinger’s tenure as secretary of state is a tale in which, again and again, he encountered the limits of his power, and found himself unable to impose his will.

The policies Kissinger developed largely in secret to help wind down the Vietnam War enjoyed far less support once the war was over and they were subjected to more normal, open debate. His influence ebbed steadily. In 1975, Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon a year earlier, forced Kissinger to give up the national-security job. Ford created further checks on Kissinger’s power by picking two former congressional colleagues, Donald Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush, as secretary of defense and CIA director, respectively. Congress itself voted into law a series of challenges to Kissinger’s policies, something it had consistently failed to do under Nixon. Perhaps worst of all, the secretary of state bore some of the blame for Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election. The president’s campaign managers told reporters they saw him as a vulnerability. So did Ronald Reagan, whose bid for the Republican nomination centered in part on a promise to fire Kissinger.

Kissinger’s lost dominance was especially pronounced in what was arguably the central arena of his policy: the stable relationship—known as “détente”—that he sought to establish with the Soviet Union. His problems began with arms control. In November 1974, soon after Ford became president, Kissinger arranged a quick summit with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, hoping for a breakthrough in negotiating a long-term treaty to limit each side’s strategic nuclear forces. But he was never able to turn the framework they agreed on into a real treaty. One obstacle was a congressional requirement that U.S. and Soviet forces be equal—at a time when Soviet missiles were getting steadily bigger and more numerous. Outside experts claimed that Kissinger’s framework couldn’t meet that test. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Paul Nitze—a senior national-security official under Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson—insisted it would give Soviet forces a three-to-one advantage. (Privately, Nitze was far angrier, calling the secretary of state a “traitor to his country.”)

Even harder for Kissinger to handle was opposition within Ford’s inner circle. Rumsfeld, once he became defense secretary, was ready to take disagreements with Kissinger right into the Oval Office, telling the president that the United States had been losing its nuclear edge for a decade. At the CIA, Bush approved an assessment largely endorsing Nitze’s critique. Outside the administration, Reagan echoed the same charges. No surprise, then, that Ford eventually put the talks aside.

Kissinger found the ideological dimension of Soviet-American relations still more vexing. He had promised Soviet leaders to expand trade ties by granting Moscow “Most Favored Nation” tariff status, but he could not manage congressional demands for freer emigration from the Soviet Union. The initiative collapsed, but not before senior figures in both Congress and the Kremlin concluded that Kissinger had been deceiving them. On human rights more generally, the secretary of state was isolated within his own administration. He did persuade the president not to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous and outspoken Soviet dissident, but three other members of the Ford Cabinet defied him and conspicuously attended an AFL-CIO dinner in Solzhenitsyn’s honor. Even the young Dick Cheney, then the deputy White House chief of staff, dissented: Détente, he argued, didn’t have to be all “sweetness and light.”

[Gary J. Bass: The people who didn’t matter to Henry Kissinger]

Learning little from this opposition, Kissinger continued to hurt himself with scarcely concealed disdain for opponents of the Soviet regime. (“You know,” he once joked, “what would have happened to them under Stalin.”) The impact reached well beyond Washington. When Reagan delegates to the 1976 Republican convention wanted to repudiate Kissinger, they drafted a platform plank titled “Morality in Foreign Policy.” Ford and his advisers—who had already banned official use of the word détente—felt they had to allow it to pass.

Apart from arms control and human rights, Kissinger also had trouble imposing his views on Soviet-American competition in the Third World. When he wanted to launch a covert program to arm rebels against Moscow’s client regime in Angola, news quickly leaked to The New York Times. Congressional Democrats, predictably, voted to block the weapons transfer altogether. Less predictably, many Republican senators—liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike—also joined in, giving the measure a two-to-one majority. The president’s own party was deserting its celebrity diplomat.

Kissinger was furious, just as he had been earlier in 1975 when, with the fall of Saigon approaching, he proposed a big increase in arms supplies for South Vietnam. To make it happen, however, congressional approval was necessary—and again wanting. Ford ultimately chose not to fight the issue. Instead, in a speech at Tulane University, he declared the war “finished as far as America is concerned.” The White House did not even let Kissinger know that the game-over announcement was coming.

Much of the commentary on Kissinger’s career has presented him as the embodiment of unchecked presidential power over foreign policy. But the pushback against his policies grew steadily stronger as their downsides became better known. In the 1970s, Congress became far more assertive on foreign policy, legislating issues including arms control, human rights, foreign military sales, and covert action. Kissinger frequently railed against the decade-long decline in national-security budgets, but this too was part of his legacy. So were other institutional reforms, such as the Carter administration’s creation of a human-rights bureau in the State Department and the annual publication of global-human-rights reports. Other forms of pushback were less foreseeable: The “most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era” surely never imagined what Jimmy Carter’s high-profile envoy to China—Leonard Woodcock, the former head of the United Auto Workers—would tell his Beijing staff at their first meeting: “Never again shall we embarrass ourselves before a foreign nation the way Henry Kissinger did with the Chinese.”

After he left office, Kissinger kept much of the advice he gave his successors confidential, probably thinking that a little mystery about the extent of his influence would only help his new consulting business. But enough is known about some of his Oval Office meetings to challenge the common picture of presidents and advisers listening reverently while Henry Kissinger shared his wisdom. Kissinger’s sustained effort to reorient Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union provides a striking example. Together with Nixon, he argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was cynically exploiting the president’s naive antinuclear sentiments so as to tear apart the Western alliance. Under perestroika, they argued, the Soviet threat was actually increasing, not diminishing. Reagan ignored them—and over time harvested a global Soviet foreign-policy retreat.

Kissinger’s shortfalls in office and after are not the whole story, of course. In his first weeks as secretary of state, he was plunged into a crisis—Egypt’s surprise Yom Kippur attack on Israel, followed by the OPEC oil embargo. The cease-fire and disengagement agreements he negotiated bolstered American influence in the Middle East, a region to which he had paid little previous attention. He seemed, to quote the title of my colleague Martin Indyk’s recent book, the “master of the game.”

Yet here, too, the master’s record seems ripe for reassessment—and not just for his early, forgivable missteps. At the start of the Yom Kippur war, Kissinger thought it might be best to keep a low profile and meet Israel’s needs indirectly, by contracting with private companies to deliver arms. Nixon ordered his celebrity policy maker to stop dithering and organize a U.S. airlift. “Do it now!” he barked. More serious is the charge that, even at the height of his power, Kissinger had, of all things, a too-limited conception of what diplomacy could achieve. The most it should try to accomplish, he felt, was to stabilize the world, not to alter—much less transform—it. Hence, the secretary of state was reluctant to take on the hardest parts of the Middle East puzzle—above all, the clash between Israelis and Palestinians, still atop the headlines half a century later.

[From the December 2016 issue: The lessons of Henry Kissinger]

Indyk traces Kissinger’s hesitation to the same sources others have cited: his conservative view of history, his immersion as a scholar in the diplomacy of 19th-century Europe, and his personal experience of 20th-century totalitarianism. All of these drove home the value of stability. But, in looking to explain this conception of diplomacy, we should not leave out what Kissinger surely learned from his own bumpy record as secretary of state. No matter what the tributes and obituaries say, every day on the job confirmed the limits of his power, the difficulty of overcoming them, and his ability to make mistakes when he tried to do so.

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’Tis the season of Taylor Swift. Maybe you’re sick of her, or maybe you’re obsessed. Either way, you are likely finding yourself in the middle of a Girl Culture moment. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The 10 best films of 2023 The hybrid-car dilemma If Trump Wins: Trump isn’t bluffing.

Girlhood’s Big Year

After Thanksgiving dinner, as my family members were settling in around the television for our annual football nap, a picture of a certain blond pop star floated across the screen. “Taylor Swift is so stupid,” a relative groaned. “Just show the game!”

I was surprised. Not by the comment itself—that’s typical uncle behavior—but because he was, shockingly, the first man in my life to express disgust about Taylor Swift’s recent ubiquity. Many of my guy friends have danced in the crowd at the Eras Tour. They have sent me silly social-media memes of Travis Kelce and Taylor, because my friends know I love their coupledom. For weeks, my father has been thrilled to answer all of my questions about “bye weeks” and “tight ends.” These men are not threatened by Taylor’s domination of the NFL. They love her! And I love them!

On that November afternoon, the realization hit me suddenly, even though the signs, and media reports, have been there for months: We are in the boom times of Girl Culture—brought forth, in part, by the incandescent glow of Taylor Swift’s torch.

Girl Culture is the art and media that values and communicates girls’ perspectives, according to Elizabeth Scala, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Girl Culture has always been a Thing. (See: Clueless, and Jane Austen.) But in the past 10 years, Scala says, it has seeped into the mainstream in a new way: Swift’s Eras Tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. But also: hot-girl walks. Girl dinners. Taylor Swift is on ESPN now. It’s impossible to look away.

These days, professors at numerous U.S. colleges are teaching classes about Taylor Swift’s music and entrepreneurship. Last year, Scala became one of the first, designing a course in which students analyze song structure alongside famous literature. Scala wants her students to be able to speak intelligently and objectively about Swift’s work, she told me. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, three quatrains, or units of four lines, are usually followed by a couplet turn, which summarizes or questions the earlier lines. Scala gets her students to care about sonnet structure by showing them that “Taylor Swift is doing something very similar in moving from lyrics to chorus, and then the bridge is where she’s making the turn.” And, as all Swifties know, Taylor can write a bridge.

In my college friend group, liking Taylor Swift wasn’t cool. It was “girly,” which meant it was vapid. So when 1989 came out, instead of shouting the lyrics to “Out of the Woods,” I was watching boys play video games and pretending to love Arcade Fire. Lots of Taylor fans have stories like this. So does Swift, and that’s part of her success.

A lot of Swift’s music is about women giving their feelings and experiences the credence they deserve. “All Too Well” is a good example, Scala notes. The song is about a red scarf and an autumn romance, ostensibly with Jake Gyllenhaal, but it’s also an angry reaction to the notion that an important relationship was all in her head. “Taylor gets to come back and say, No, you don’t get to tell me this wasn’t real. I was there. It was rare; I remember it,” Scala told me. Like all of Taylor’s songs, “All Too Well” offers Taylor’s Version of a life event, and that version is often much more compelling—and richer in detail and sneaky Easter eggs—than a narrative that most intermediaries could provide. So compelling, in fact, that Swift has made some celebrity-profile writers wonder whether she even needs them anymore.

Even as I welcome the acceptance of girl culture with open, eager arms, a clarification is in order: Appreciating Girl Culture doesn’t mean being uncritical of it. You are free to dislike Barbie, for example, because you found America Ferrera’s monologue on feminism way too on the nose. You can be obsessed with Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls, while acknowledging that it becomes virtually unwatchable after Season 4. Similarly, just because Taylor Swift communicates an arresting narrative doesn’t mean that journalists—or even fans—have to accept it as truth.

In his Person of the Year interview with Swift for Time, Sam Lansky points out that, despite Swift’s assertions, no one actually canceled Swift in 2016—during a public feud with Kanye West and his then-wife, Kim Kardashian—or took her career away. But then Lansky immediately negates this important point by shrugging his shoulders and writing, “Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt?” Can you imagine if all journalists treated their subjects so credulously?

Of course, the power of Swift’s feelings has always been her great strength. The tiny, specific details of her life—of all of our lives—are how she’s come to dominate Girl Culture.

Thinking back, my family member’s Thanksgiving comment sounded strange because it was almost vintage. A tedious throwback to a time, albeit not that long ago, when it was socially acceptable to openly belittle the things that women like. Not anymore. We are in the “girlies” era now. Saying that in 2012 might have felt cheesy. Today, it feels metal as hell.

Related:

Taylor Swift’s Tinder masterpiece Justice for the teenage Taylor Swift

Today’s News

According to law-enforcement officials, a former college professor who had applied for a position at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas is suspected of shooting four people on its campus yesterday. A judge in Texas ruled that a woman whose fetus has a lethal abnormality may terminate her pregnancy despite the state’s abortion laws. Representative Jamaal Bowman was censured by the House for pulling a fire alarm in a Capitol Hill building in September; Bowman claims that it was an accident.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The diamond industry achieved what is arguably the most successful corporate-marketing campaign of all time, Amanda Mull writes. Up for Debate: How much time did you spend with peers in adolescence, and what effect did that have on the rest of your life? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers.

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Evening Read

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The Sanctions Against Russia Are Starting to Work

By Leon Aron

Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin finds himself in a war of attrition, his only chance at victory depends on outlasting both Ukraine and its military supporters. He isn’t merely counting on the demoralization of the Ukrainian people and on “Ukraine fatigue” in the West; he’s also assuming that his own country has the stamina for a long and brutal fight. Yet after nearly two years in which Putin has largely succeeded in insulating most of his subjects from the war, the effects of Western sanctions—coupled with the astronomical and growing human and monetary costs of the conflict—are finally beginning to cause pain for the Russian general public.

Immediately after the invasion of Ukraine early last year, when the United States, the European Union, and other democratic nations moved to disconnect Russia from global financial and trade networks, many Western commentators hoped that the country’s economy would quickly buckle, creating pressure on Putin to withdraw. That hasn’t happened.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Caity Weaver, who is one of the best magazine writers working today, recently wrote an utterly charming profile of Stephanie Courtney—the actress and comedian you might recognize as Flo from the Progressive insurance commercials. The story is goofy and silly and also, somehow, extremely deep.

— Elaine

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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