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...
Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity. Transparency, for this reason, was vital: We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of...
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...
Safety depends, Kennan told a National War College audience in December 1948, on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world: To put them where necessary o...
We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing. Athenians found the fruits of other countries to be as familiar a luxury...
This is where the capitalists got it right: they were better than the communists at learning from history, because they never bought into any single, sacrosanct, and therefore unchallengeable theory o...
These things did not happen simply because Reagan gave a speech or because Orwell wrote a book: the remainder of this book complicates the causation. It is worth starting with visions, though, because...
Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to...
Both this saint and this sinner, then, see proportionality as a pathway. For Augustine, it shows rulers, however deeply into iniquity they may have descended, the way back from the City of Man to the...
. .biographers tend to regard as character those elements of personality that remain constant, or nearly so, throughout. . .Like practitioners of fractal geometry, biographers seek patterns that persi...
The outcome defied categories. 46 Was it a victory for principle or expediency? For the rights of man or the rules of statecraft? For lightness of being or heaviness of hand? For a republic or, as Was...
The alternative Kennan described as the particularized approach. It was skeptical of any scheme for compressing international affairs into legalist concepts. It holds that the content is more importan...
The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the Un...
The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity—the ocean of land ceded in 1783—fail to revive fami...
That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments. Sailors rely on them before going to sea. Soldiers employ them in planning missions. Surgeons demand them, to make sure they’ll have...
Just what Khrushchev intended to do with his Cuban missiles is, even now, unclear: it was characteristic of him not to think things through.
His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the wo...
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 still retain the ability to function.
They went from regarding these compromises as regrettable to considering them necessary, then normal, then even desirable.
An atmosphere of lies and distortions, in other words, of which the very essence is the unceasing effort to induce people to abandon the evidence of their senses and of all objective criteria and to a...