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...
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...
I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman, she told her troops as the Spanish Armada sailed for home in 1588, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too. Relishing oppo...
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...
The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the cr...
Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.
Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate a landscape even...
The recognition of human insignificance did not, as one might have expected, enhance the role of divine agency in explaining human affairs: it had just the opposite effect. It gave rise to a secular c...
From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those of the United States...
Jefferson was a genius, the historian Joseph Ellis has noted, at concealing contradictions within abstractions. The Virginian who insisted that all men are created equal arrived in Philadelphia attend...
The danger for Americans lay less in another Pearl Harbor than in what they might do to themselves because they feared one. For confronting totalitarians required, in many respects, emulating them. Th...
Goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy, he admonished the House of Representatives in a speech of his own on July 4, 1821: She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She...
You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters… with the strength of faith…. You must be strong with the strength of hope…. You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death…. When we are stro...
That's why war--explicitly in Clausewitz, implicitly in Tolstoy--must reflect policy. For when policy reflects war, it's because some high-level hedgehog--a Xerxes, or a Napoleon--has fallen in love w...
Their very independence from Great Britain resulted, as Thomas Paine had predicted it would in 1776, from the implausibility that a Continent [could] be perpetually governed by an island.12
WHAT IF Stalin himself was the problem, though, and communism might be salvaged with different leadership? The men who sought to succeed him all believed the diagnosis to be accurate and the prescript...
With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. Here, then,...
Stalin’s first move, uncharacteristically, was to apologize to the Chinese comrades for having underestimated them: Our opinions are not always correct, he told a visiting delegation from Beijing in J...
It was, as Berlin remembered it: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. 2 The passage survives only as a fragment, so its context has long been lost. But the Renaissance scho...
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