When Evil Regimes Threaten to Do Evil, Believe Them

Some events seem impossible right up to the minute that they take place. The idea that terrorists might turn airliners into missiles was relegated to novels until the morning of September 11, 2001. The global financial system seemed impregnable before Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008. For many people, the chances that a reality-TV star would become the first president without any experience in government or the military seemed less than zero until 2:29 a.m. on November 9, 2016. For decades, a pandemic that would kill 6 million people worldwide in two years and unleash long-lasting social, economic, and cultural havoc was the basis of science-fiction movie plots. Then the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in the United States.