If you were to take account of everything . . . , you would never do anything. It is better to have a brave heart and endure one half of the terrors we dread than to [calculate] all of the terrors and...
Well, no, if we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us wouldn’t, even in this more politically correct age. For satisfying the claims of justice in this instance would not only disrupt the presen...
That American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow...
The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see.
Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln is dramatization at its best. It shows the president, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, trying to make good on the claim, in the Declaration of Independence, that all me...
Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist’s great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around.
Why, then, did the Americans invest so much in Vietnam when, in comparison with the whole of their interests at the time, so little was at stake there? Thucydidean resemblances, I think, suggest an an...
The overall population of the German Democratic Republic had declined, since 1949, from 19 million to 17 million.51
Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe.
I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold hands with the Devil.
Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of America...
Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and de...
Neither Xerxes nor Artabanus, therefore, would have passed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test, from 1936, for a first-rate intelligence: the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and...
And, hence, to manage it. For if, as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act...
The prudent leader dreads and reflects on everything that can happen to him but is bold when he is in the thick of action. Xerxes listens patiently, but objects that if you were to take account of eve...
It’s not a very nice solution, Kennedy acknowledged, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.54 The president could not resist observing, though, when he himself visited the Berlin Wall in Jun...
It’s no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, m...
Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepa...
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of...
Whatever their contradictions, Americans were consistent, before and after their first revolution, in deeply distrusting government. Having been left on their own for so long, the colonists saw as sin...