Sometimes, disasters can be clarifying. Not so long ago, the Houthi warriors who have ruled northern Yemen for the past decade seemed more like a nuisance to Saudi Arabia than a threat. The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was busy glad-handing with tech bros and AI executives, talking up the kingdom’s future as a tourism destination.
For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker.
Earlier this month, high in the snow-capped mountains near the border between Iran and Iraq, a Kurdish rebel led me down a foot trail to the opening of a cave. We stepped inside and walked about 50 yards along a dark man-made passageway where water dripped steadily from the rocky ceiling. Then we turned down one of the cave’s branching tunnels and passed through a wood-framed entryway into a brightly lit and immaculate room with a long table and a television mounted on a wall.
Photographs by Jack Califano
The six-car ICE convoy came to a stop and instantly dozens of people swarmed it, cellphones in hand, while others ran out of nearby houses—I saw a woman in gym shorts in the 20-degree weather—and began surrounding the masked and heavily armed agents who had spilled out of their black SUVs.
Photographs by Jedrzej Nowicki
In a town called Staryi Saltiv, in northeastern Ukraine, many buildings lie in ruins after years of war, but only one has been demolished twice: the district school. Russian missiles leveled it in early 2022. The town gradually raised the money not just to reconstruct it but to enlarge and improve it, adding new facilities for disabled children.
For anyone who has wondered what an “America First” foreign policy looks like, Donald Trump provided a vivid example today when he declared a cease-fire with the Houthis, the Yemeni militia that has been under U.S. bombardment for the past seven weeks.
The Houthis have “capitulated” and agreed to no longer target American ships, Trump said, interrupting a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with an impromptu announcement that appeared to take some of his own team by surprise.
After the Trump administration inadvertently texted its war plans to this magazine’s editor in chief last month, people all over the world—including spies, fighter pilots, and foreign leaders—had to wonder if their secrets were safe with the United States government.
But the humiliating gaffes of Signalgate are only one measure of the Donald Trump team’s recklessness.
Illustrations by Matt Rota
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On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo.
As word spread on Saturday that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been killed in his underground Beirut bunker by an Israeli air strike, people began quietly reckoning with the possibility that Lebanon’s political architecture might be about to shift for the first time in more than three decades. And that, in turn, raised the prospect that locked doors might soon open across the Middle East.
It felt like a science-fiction film, one Lebanese friend told me. At almost exactly the same moment—3:30 p.m. today—pagers exploded all over Lebanon, leaving hideous gashes and wounds on the heads, hands, and hips of their owners.
The significance of the attack quickly became clear: The pagers were being used by members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant movement that has been fighting an undeclared war with Israel since October.
The ugly right-wing riots that broke out across the United Kingdom over the past week have put Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a difficult position: He and his new Labour government must address the widespread concern about immigration that helped drive the unrest—not because of what the rioters have done and said, but in spite of it.
The lawlessness on display in recent days doesn’t change the fact that the British government has been mishandling immigration for years.
“After Mahsa, everything is hanging by a hair.”Those words, spray-painted in red on a Tehran wall last week, sum up the atmosphere of rage and defiance that has consumed Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died in police custody in mid-September after being arrested for failing to properly veil her hair.Rallies have turned progressively more violent.
In the spring of 1989, a 21-year-old Iraqi university student named Ali came home and made a shocking discovery: On the living-room table of his family’s home was a copy of The Satanic Verses. A friend of Ali’s father had smuggled Salman Rushdie’s controversial book from London, removing its distinctive blue cover and hiding it in his luggage. This was like finding a bomb.