For decades, three states treated Washington as their ultimate security guarantor. In August 2026, they stopped waiting for it. The Makkah defense pact between Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia is framed by all three governments as purely defensive. The real question the pact never answers is: defensive against whom?

For nearly eighty years, one relationship has been treated as close to a constant in American foreign policy: unconditional US backing for Israel. That backing was never really about shared values. It was a bet, that Israel was the one actor in the Gulf and the wider Middle East Washington could count on to protect its interests there. That bet now looks shakier than at any point since 1948.

The AI that people seem to be most fascinated by is not necessarily the most intelligent, but the most human-like. This raises a question deeper than whether machines can become sufficiently intelligent: what would it mean for an AI to become human?

Human rational inquiry begins from three undeniable observations about reality, and from those observations, four metaphysical positions become possible. Materialism is the first of these, and historically the most consequential.