Programming note: Tonight, Sunday, I'll be back here at SteynOnline with Part Seventeen of our seventy-ninth Tale for Our Time, Sax Rohmer's Mohammedan caper of 1914 - The Quest of the Sacred Slipper.
~As we begin a second week of shock-and-awe, there is an increasingly pronounced spring-of-2002 vibe to much of the "conservative" commentary. All the things they're saying about Trump, Hegseth and Rubio, they once said about Bush, Rumsfeld and Powell: why, these are serious men, not like the boobs of yore. I would have added Cheney, but, unlike the then Vice President, the current one (save for yesterday's non-speaking part at the ceremonial return of America's war dead) appears to be off to the Bahamas for the duration:
A CBS News town hall with JD Vance was postponed indefinitely amid the vastly unpopular war with Iran, with the vice president saying he feels uncomofrable discussing the war — which inevitably would have come up in the town hall.
In a sense, one can understand why so much of the right digs the retro vibe: geopolitically, it was the last good time - before the Sunni Triangle, Three Cups of Tea, Speaker Pelosi, President Obama, Arab Spring, Benghazi, the "Afghan National Army", green-on-blue, the Fall of Kabul, the Ukraine meat grinder...
So, if you're similarly inclined, you'll be glad to hear Condi's back. She was at the White House on Friday for some sports yakfest, but lingered to enjoy some quality time with the Commander-in-Chief:
After the NCAA meeting at the White House, Condoleezza Rice is pulled aside by Donald Trump and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and walks back with them. https://t.co/RekE7EDzWK pic.twitter.com/QMsd59EONh
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) March 7, 2026
I met the sometime Secretary of State and National Security Advisor three times, I think, in the early years of this century, the first not long before 9/11. I was seated at dinner that night next to Barbara Olson, who was murdered a few weeks later on board Flight 77 when it ploughed into the Pentagon. Condi seemed very brainy to my younger self, but that didn't stop her talking bollocks on occasion. From my syndicated solumn twenty sodding years ago - November 26th 2006:
"The great majority of Palestinian people," said the secretary of state to columnist Cal Thomas the other day, "they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don't believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that's what people are going to do."
Cal Thomas asked a sharp follow-up: "Do you think this or do you know this?"
"Well, I think I know it," said Dr. Rice.
"You think you know it?"
"I think I know it."
So many of our present woes are due to thinking we know things.
Maybe the alternatives posited by Condi are not contradictory; maybe you can gow up to go to university and then become a suicide-bomber, especially if you go to Oxford or the Sorbonne, which are likely to be offering Masters in Jihad Studies soon enough. But instead, because of our lack of investment in "creating the right conditions", all those cute Pally moppets from Condi's tenure had to make do with PhDs in Gang-Rape Studies at Rafah Community College, which in turn led to October 7th, which in turn led to the war launched last weekend.
As I said, Condi is super-brainy. So it would be a surprise if she didn't know she was talking total bollocks. Nevertheless, she talked it. And two sod-bollocking decades later here we are.
And those were the good ol' days compared to what's happened since. So on this week's episode of my ongoing audio adaptation of the bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It I consider the particular nature of Washington's revitalised imperium:
We now live in the American moment... It has an unmatched dominance that the British never enjoyed and that is historically unprecedented. Yet it remains a paradox: the non-imperial superpower. For good or ill, the American people don't have an imperialist bone in their body – as we saw, in fact, in post-liberation Iraq.
Which didn't turn out so well.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-Seven of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over six dozen gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Twenty-Eight of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
