A Nation in Transition

For the past six months, living abroad, I’ve been asked one question more than any other.

Will you go back?

And every time, I pause.
Not because I don’t have thoughts.
But because the answer isn’t simple.
Because I’m not just deciding where I live—
I’m questioning what home even means anymore.

What do we return to when the country that shaped us is unraveling at the seams?

We’ve watched a pandemic turn neighbors into strangers.
We’ve witnessed the rise of surveillance over service, profit over people.
We’ve seen book bans, rights reversed, and billionaires buy their way into relevance.

Still, I don’t write this with cynicism.
I write it with curiosity.

Because maybe our role now isn’t to mourn what the U.S. was, but to reimagine who we can be.
To ask questions rather than offer answers.
To build bridges instead of barriers.
To understand this shift not as loss, but as evolution.

The more I live abroad, the more I want to know how other countries remember.
How they carry their wars and migrations.
How their ideologies have shifted and returned again.
What ancestral wisdom shaped their living, and how that wisdom was lost—or taken—by empire.

I want to understand the shape of a country not just by its politics,
but by its people.
How they grieve.
How they govern.
How they imagine the future.

And that’s why this question—Will you go back?—feels too narrow.
Because the real question is: Can we build a new kind of world?

America is still so young.
In global time, she’s barely out of adolescence— loud, brilliant, confused, and high on her own myths.

Maybe that means the blueprint is still being written.

So if we could start over—
not with fantasy, but with full truth—
what kind of nation would we create?
What do we carry forward?
And what do we finally, let go?

That’s the question I’m sitting with.
Because standing here, in this body, in this moment,
I can feel something shifting.
Not just in America, but in all of us.
We are unlearning myths and recovering buried truths.
We are reshaping how we live, love, and liberate.
And the fall of an empire might just be the invitation to rise differently.

So I ask again—not as a woman with all the answers,
but as someone willing to imagine:

If we could build something better,
what would it look like?

Until next time,
Foreign Affairs