Six months. That’s how long I’ve been off Waypoints. It’s also how long this silly and self-defeating war has gone on. Engineered by a handful of spectacularly incompetent leaders, with at least one of them making for a perfect James Bond villain, the conflict against Iran has been a masterclass in historical folly — haphazard, hubristic, brainless, and featuring a questionably giddy media gulping the Kool-Aid of military might.

Watching this fiasco unfold has awakened many thoughts, but on a more measured note, it highlights what Robert Kaplan called ‘present-ness’ — this affliction where “we lose all memory of the past and remain oblivious to the future.”

Now nearly six months into this mess, a few realities have become clearer to me.

1. Power is not control.

Trump is learning in real time that there’s a massive difference between power and leverage.

For decades, ideological war hawks in DC and Tel Aviv argued that military action against Iran would be good for the Middle East. Mr. Bond Villain himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, has peddled this fantasy for nearly 30 years. And yet, here we are — witnessing the superior firepower of the US and Israel create ever more chaos as Iran flexes a leverage that neither one can bomb out of existence.

Think about it. Destroying infrastructure, assassinating leaders, and degrading military capabilities has been easy for the two most powerful militaries in the world. But producing a favorable political outcome has been hard. The destruction they’ve wrought has bred entirely new catastrophes and instability. From an Israeli perspective, that could very well be the point. It’s easy to argue that historically, Israel, the strongest economy and military in the region, has long been more interested in war than in peace.

But chaos and instability in the Middle East are not US interests — just ask those tracking passage through the Hormuz Strait and Iran’s “lateral escalation” across the wider Gulf region.

That is the inherent stupidity of the “might-makes-right” worldview, propagated so vociferously by Trump, Netanyahu, and their minions. This pseudo-doctrine mistakes the ability to compel for the ability to control. But as we’ve seen so clearly, military dominance is not strategic dominance.

2. Wars spill over.

Those who thought this stunt could somehow be neatly contained — geographically, economically, or politically — were either lying, dangerously detached from reality, or just deliberately dangerous. You cannot set (another) fire to the center of the world’s most volatile region and expect the smoke to stay local.

The Turkey-Saudi Arabia-Pakistan defense pact is only one recent example. Another is Ukraine’s reckless gambit on an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea. And of course, the wider fallout across Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria—fault lines that don’t exist in isolation. The downstream costs were always going to be innumerable.

As for the repercussions beyond regional instability and security assumptions — nearly every major economy has taken a hit in some form. Oil and natural gas have forced new questions on household budgets and industrial production. Fertilizer has raised questions about today’s food prices and tomorrow’s crop harvests. Shipping disruptions are becoming supply-chain problems.

This is why I’ve found the war so difficult to treat as just another Middle East conflict. Like an airborne pathogen, this ultimate ‘forever war’ respects neither borders nor our wallets. And that’s before we count the costs of profligate US government and military spending, the casual normalization of targeted assassinations, and the weakening breath of international law. The consequences will easily outlast the ammunition, while Russia and China smile from the sidelines.

3. The news informs us, but it rarely educates us.

The news and information surrounding this war has made it nearly impossible to look away while simultaneously making genuine understanding weirdly difficult.

I see this constantly in conversations with people in my own life, from a couple of ardent Trump supporters to some liberal-minded Israelis. Many seem unwilling or possibly incapable of recognizing the grand implications of this war of choice.

The headlines—as shown by major TV news networks and many legacy newspapers—fail to contextualize and educate. Developments are presented as decisive, but the military strikes, Truth Social posts, market movements and reassurances, assassinations, and threats to blockade or bomb ‘like never before’ all fail to provide the historical context needed to understand what’s really altering the trajectory of our future.

Recognizing the difference between being bombarded with info, opinions, and spin, and actually possessing an arc of understanding is why I look to specific guides.

A few minds have consistently helped me see past the cacophony.

Throughout all of this, there have been a few people whose insights and historical analysis have repeatedly helped me look past the media theater.

• Trita Parsi: Quite possibly the sharpest mind on this foreign policy blunder. He cuts through the rhetoric to explain the actual political incentives and strategic calculus driving Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran. You can find him at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and on his Substack.

• John Mearsheimer: The ultimate realist. He’s an intellectual giant and has been invaluable for mapping out geopolitics, exposing the gap between what politicians think military force will achieve and the real chaos it actually produces. He’s also on Substack and at Mearsheimer.com.

• Vali Nasr: Arguably the most insightful scholar on the Islamic Republic of Iran, he has deep historical knowledge of the country’s relationship to the region and the decades of friction that duped the “foreign policy blob” into this quagmire. Nobody understands the country’s internal mechanics better. Follow him on Twitter.

The war on Iran is a paradigm-shifting event. We won’t fully appreciate it until years from now, and how it’s reshaping our world. But staying informed is important. And having a true reading means finding the voices who can actually help us trace the ramifications and trends of the world being built above the pointless rubble.

— Fela Kuti, “Shuffering & Shmiling, Pt. 1&2”
51.5447° N, 0.0575° W

February has flown by, but its been eventful. I’ve managed to read more than usual, collect a shoulder injury playing soccer, host visiting friends, catch the Dutch speedskaters collect gold at the Olympics, and stay up way past bedtime to watch the Super Bowl (and Bad Bunny’s spectacularly bold halftime show). I also traveled a bit, cycling down to Rotterdam and hopping on a train across the Dutch Bible Belt. Throughout it all, a few things have stuck with me.

Here’s one book, one place, and one idea.

Zaitoun by Yasmin Khan

I finally bought Zaitoun, Yasmin Khan’s celebration of Palestinian cuisine, and a book that had been on my radar for years.

Similar to Khan’s other cookbooks, it reads as much like travel writing as it does a collection of recipes. Guided by her past life as a human rights campaigner, Khan doesn’t just share and teach recipes; she shows how deeply food connects to history, culture, and belonging. I love the power in this book and her profiles and anecdotes. What has stood out to me most is how naturally it moves between food, memory, and national identity. It’s a celebration of the Palestinian kitchen, inspired by the old Jewish adage, as Khan reminds us, that “an enemy is just a person whose story you haven’t heard yet.”

If someone asked me where to start learning about Palestinian cookery and everyday life, I’d say track down a Palestinian grandmother. But this book would be my second recommendation — alongside The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis — and honestly, before Ottolenghi or Tamimi.

Flevoland (on the way to Zwolle)

To reach the beautiful medieval city of Zwolle from The Hague, one can take the train cutting straight through Flevoland — the Netherlands’ youngest province, and perhaps its boldest experiment.

While staring out the window, it’s easy to forget that this entire part of the country was nothing but sea until a few generations ago. Today, it’s reclaimed land filled with modern housing, growing cities, farmland, and long stretches of open sky. Flevoland is a reminder that the Dutch treat geography almost like a design project.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the space between Almere and Lelystad, where the scenery suddenly shifts. The expanse between both cities feels emptier, wilder, even un-Dutch. The Oostvaardersplassen is a vast nature reserve project where hundreds of migratory bird species, large grazing highlanders, and semi-wild horses roam land that didn’t exist until the late 1950s. I would describe it as a sort of northern European version of the Serengeti.

Running along its southern border, the train underscores the quiet surrealism of this Dutch savanna. And adding to the mystique is a fact—shared by a friend—that Flevoland’s soil is so rich that just south of the protected area stand the Netherlands’ tallest trees (again, on land that is less than 100 years old!)

All this to say, Oostvaardersplassen is a beautifully strange patch of land in an already unique province.

And it epitomizes the centuries-old saying, “God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.” This video does a pretty good job of explaining how that came to be.

Surrealism (in everyday life)

Talking about surrealism…a recent exhibition at Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum sent me down a rabbit hole. Turns out surrealism is more than melting clocks. Beyond Surrealism opened the door to what it might mean in our everyday life: not just art, but a way of paying attention to people, things, and moments around us.

I was surprised by how much we can apply from surrealist thought into daily life — and many of us probably do, without realizing it. A few ideas I’ve started experimenting with:

• Spontaneous writing. Spend 10 minutes writing continuously. But here’s the catch: do so without backspacing, re-reading, or analyzing. Don’t try to be interesting. Just write.

• Disrupt routines on purpose. For example, follow an arbitrary rule on your next walk. Or listen for a sentence someone says at the checkout or in a cafe and write it down. Ask why did that grab my attention. The point is to study how our minds select meaning.

• Embrace chance encounters. I like this one. Open a book to a random page and treat the first sentence as a prompt for the day. Or, let an overheard conversation seed a thought, and write about it.

• Make space for playful seriousness. I’m still warming up to this one, which probably means I need it most. For example, give mundane things secret names. Or ask absurd but revealing questions, such as “If this week were a room, what’s in the corner I’m avoiding?” The point is to invite an emotional honesty that might not arrive any other way.

And perhaps my favorite…

• Resist productivity logic. I loved learning that surrealism is anti-utilitarian — that not everything needs to be optimized. So, do something with no goal for 20 minutes. No, doom scrolling doesn’t count. But doodling does. Or rearrange a room just for the look of it. Write nonsense poetry. Most importantly, do not share it or improve it. The point is to break the brain’s evaluation mode.

That’s it. One book, one place, one idea — and maybe a few new habits in the making. Now time to go make maqloubeh.

— People Under the Stairs, “Acid Raindrops”
52.4573° N, 5.4194° E

I love February. Not because of roses or Valentine’s Day. And not because people are catching their breath after the holidays. I love February because it’s the month when personal memory and public history keep bumping into each other.

February holds a lot for such a short month. In the U.S., it’s Black History Month, which, as an American, helped shape how I think about inheritance, struggle, and the arc of unfinished work. In the Netherlands (mostly its Catholic south), it’s Carnival, which means cities briefly abandon their manners as people get colorful, loud, and unruly in very joyful ways.

For me, however, this month is when my private calendar lines up most clearly with the public one. Over time, this has encouraged me to notice how history doesn’t just live in books or museums or documentaries—but how it lives in ordinary life.

February is the month my parents got married. The month my wife and I got engaged. The month my wife’s father was born. It’s also the birth month of giants whose lives have hovered in my mind between history and fascination: Abraham Lincoln (who somehow pulled me into my first real job after college); Michael Jordan; George Harrison; and Charles Darwin. Even the deaths of Buddha and Michel de Montaigne make an appearance. All having lived entirely different lives, but all personifying waypoints, anchoring countless people and cultures to reflect on what matters most.

But what these dates share isn’t greatness. It’s closeness. Serendipitously, February has a way of bringing big stories closer to home.

I’ve come to think of it as a month that reveals how life and history actually work. For example: the anniversaries you don’t plan, along with the habits, beliefs, practices, and stories lived or passed down until they shape how you move through the world.

That’s how I think about my grandmother. She was born in February and passed away just two days before her 94th birthday.

She spent most of her life in Nablus, a city often reduced to troubling headlines from afar. To her, however, it was simply home: a place of routines with mornings on the veranda, family and friends arriving unannounced, lunch gatherings that ignored time. Her home—built by my great-grandfather and expanded by my grandfather—looked out over the city in the valley below, with chirping birds, the five daily calls to prayer, and the roar of Israeli fighter jets ricocheting between the mountains.

Madinat Nablus carries these layers openly. Built in a valley, the Roman ‘Neapolis,’ later Arabicized into Nablus, is a city renowned for its olive oil, soap, tahini, cheese, and of course, kanafeh. It’s a place distinctly Palestinian, where care and attention persist alongside struggle and resistance. That is Jabal an-Nar. A place where empires have visibly collided to produce a distinctively proud and confident population.

A minor case in point: I once shared with my grandmother that I hadn’t been sleeping well — the proof in the tracking on my Fitbit. With a clarity that felt less like advice and more like orientation, she waved it off. The reason “you’re not resting well,” she said, “is because you’re paying attention to that thing,” as she pointed at my watch. She couldn’t have been more clear: I was teaching my brain to outsource its sense of rest.

It was a small comment, but it came with a whole worldview attached: that attention shapes reality; that tools are helpful until they replace judgment; and that history, like health, lives in what you practice every day.

People like her rarely appear in official histories, yet they are how places live on and thrive. They carry memory through habit — what they cook, how they welcome family and neighbors, what they stand for, and what they refuse to let go of.

In our Gregorian calendar, February has become, for me, a reminder to pay attention to that scale of history: how figures and forces show up in domestic spaces, and how beliefs and inheritance travel less through speeches than through daily life and the folks who model it.

Every year, February reminds me that we understand the past by noticing where it touches our lives.

I admired my grandmother and the others mentioned above. They’re the reasons why I always look forward to this month. February feels like a time to reorient. It’s filled with historical moments, ideas, and people who showed us how to live.

— George Harrison, “Got My Mind Set on You”
32.2227° N, 35.2621° E

So…what exactly is going on in the US right now?

As I write this, we’ve seen the Trump administration’s chaos and cruelty on full display in Minneapolis. A lot is going on, and all at once. During my last visit stateside, a friend and I tried to make sense of the disorientation and uncertainty. On a sunny walk up to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, we talked politics, civility, and cultural shifts in America. About halfway up, something my friend shared about his colleagues finally brought to life the sense I’d been feeling in people around my hometown of Charlottesville: most seemed more in their own bubbles than I remembered.

I’d noticed this change in small interactions — there was a kind of low-grade impatience, a sense that people were in each other’s way. More self-focused, less polite, and less small talk with strangers. Even customer service instincts felt numbed. All in all, I couldn’t tell if I was aging out of the culture or if something had genuinely shifted.

At Monticello’s gift shop, my buddy and I paused for a couple of minutes in the book section. Books by Jill Lepore, John Meacham, Allen Guelzo, and Clint Smith were asking us to reflect on America as an ‘experiment’. I remember wondering how many of us encounter these ideas outside museums or PBS documentaries. And I considered messages from another close friend who had texted, “our values are all out of whack…that has to degrade society over time.”

These thoughts and exchanges followed me back to the Netherlands, where I’ve lived for almost 13 years now.

The View from The Hague

After years of writing about the world, Robert Kaplan wrote Earning the Rockies. Part of his rationale was to study America’s “domestic condition.” It was his way of ‘coming home’ with foreign eyes. I understand that now more than ever, even as I make an effort to visit home two to three times each year.

The distance brings perspective. In my experience, however, it has also meant watching your country change as you do too. Over time, it’s been hard to know which is doing more of the shifting. In a rhyming way, I’ve started to recognize feelings my parents shared during previous family visits to the Middle East: a longing mixed with mild estrangement.

For example, years ago, someone remarked that my father’s Arabic sounded like it was from another era. It was a compliment, said with endearment, but it captured something real. When you leave a place, you freeze a version of it in time while the place keeps moving without you. In that sense, coming back means reconciling the place you remember with the one that actually exists.

Living between The Hague and Charlottesville, between Dutch moderation and American fervor, I’ve learned that progress isn’t inevitable. The Netherlands showed me that societies can build systems that work better — healthcare, public transportation, labor laws, and transporting kids in ‘bucket bikes’. But those systems endure only if people choose to prioritize and sustain them.

And what one generation builds, another can dismantle.

When I left the US in 2013, I assumed things would keep improving — more progressive politics, more equitable investments, more rational emotions, and continuing realpolitik restraint. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” By 2026, I’ve finally accepted something my Middle Eastern roots long understood: time alone doesn’t advance equity or justice. Progress isn’t inevitable.

Living abroad has softened some of my American instincts. For example, I’m less convinced that hustle equals virtue, less interested in optimizing everything, and more comfortable with contradiction. I’ve learned that not every problem needs solving, and not every conversation needs a winner.

At the same time, distance has clarified what I admire about America: the belief that reinvention is possible, and that limits can be challenged rather than accepted. Dutch pragmatism is a real strength, but American restlessness carries its own bold energy too. Living between the two has made me more attentive to humble, yet deliberate and practical choices — what Mark Twain recognized as ‘brash practicality’.

Waypoints

As the US approaches its 250th anniversary and the FIFA World Cup this summer, neither feels much like a celebration. We’re in a transition, and perhaps something messier than that. Still, there’s a strange relief in admitting that some old ways of thinking no longer work. None of this means we’re lost. It just means we need new reference points.

That’s where Waypoints comes in.

Waypoints are markers that help orient us. They give direction when certainty fades and when the terrain shifts. They’re the places and ideas that matter.

I started this project because I keep finding myself between countries and between worlds—one where, as the Economist puts it, “intelligence is pressing forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

To be clear, I’m not offering answers, only what I see and experience from The Hague — shaped by Charlottesville and DC, by 13+ years of living abroad, by time spent with family and friends in Palestine and Jordan, and by watching both the US and myself change in unexpected ways.

Some of what I’ll write will be weighty. Others lighter, such as food, books, places worth your attention and time. But all of it will be driven by the same impulse: to share the waypoints that help us navigate when clarity is in short supply.

Thanks for being here. Let’s see where this takes us.

— Hank Mobley, “Remember”
52.0705° N, 4.3007° E