Subject: What Rough Beast?
The sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, once said America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.’‘ Reflecting on these words in his brilliant 1991 profile of Noriega in Vanity Fair, the late foreign correspondent T.D. Allman posited that attempts to free others by force would “insensibly’‘ tend toward the corruption of our own freedoms and free institutions. “Adams’s argument was subtle and complex,” wrote Allman. “But he foresaw what events in our own time have demonstrated—how a war to impose freedom on Vietnam insensibly leads to Watergate; how turning Colonel Oliver North loose on the Sandinistas leads to the Iran-contra scandal.”

We have yet to find out what violent unconsidered forces will be unleashed by the dawn raid on a sleeping Venezuelan despot on the third day of 2026. —Tina Brown, Fresh Hell

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