The subject speaks its own importance, Hamilton announced in the first essay’s first paragraph, comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare o...
The Bolshevik Revolution, which had happened only a quarter century earlier, had in contrast involved the embrace of concentrated authority as a means of overthrowing class enemies and consolidating a...
Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.
Secretary of State Acheson had even announced publicly that the American defensive perimeter did not extend to South Korea.
Its most memorable scene takes place in the piazza at Cesena early one morning in 1502, where the local governor, Remirro de Orco, is found in two pieces, with a bloody knife and a block of wood betwe...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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
The most important one was the belief, which went back to Lenin, that capitalists would never be able to cooperate with one another for very long. Their inherent greediness—the irresistible urge to pl...
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...
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...
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...
Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected.