One of the most immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of empires and great nations. Some Americans, however, believe their country to be so far beyond comparison with any other country or...
Nationalists reflexively rebel against governments they perceive as lackeys of foreign power. In the twentieth century, many of these rebels were men and women inspired by American history, American p...
He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.
He projected American power through regional allies like Iran, Zaire, and Indonesia, and turned a blind eye as dictators in those countries oppressed and looted with abandon.
Expansion presented the United States with a dilemma that has confronted many colonial powers. If it allowed democracy to flower in the countries it controlled, those nations would begin acting in acc...
Countries that have the power to interfere in foreign lands almost always do so.
Bernays was one of the first masters of modern mass psychology. He liked to describe himself as the father of public relations, and no one disagreed. His specialty was what he called the conscious and...
As Allende was trying to withstand the American campaign, he also faced intense pressure from groups of workers and peasants whose revolutionary passion he had helped to awaken.
American leaders clamored for this policy because, they said, the country desperately needed a way to resolve its glut of overproduction. This glut, however, was largely illusory. While wealthy Americ...
All that this country desires is that the other republics on this continent shall be happy and prosperous, Theodore Roosevelt declared, and they cannot be happy and prosperous unless they maintain ord...
About 90 percent of the one billion Muslims in the world today identify with the Sunni tradition. Of the remainder, most are Shiites, the largest number of whom are in Iran.
The idea of using the Roman Catholic clergy to turn Guatemalans against Arbenz. Catholic priests and bishops in Guatemala, as in other Latin American countries, were closely aligned with the ruling cl...
Siblings ran the overt and covert arms of foreign policy.
This upheaval came while the region was still recovering from the shock of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which radically reshaped the strategic map of the Middle East and Central Asia.
The riots that shook Abadan led many Iranians to rally to the workers' cause, partly out of instinctive sympathy but also because of the grossly unequal terms under which the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company...
The coup bound the United States to South Vietnam in an embrace that proved disastrous to them both. In a very real sense, it was Dulles’s final legacy.
President Johnson soon Americanized the war that resulted in the death of a generation.
On December 4, 1972, President Salvador Allende of Chile told the United Nations General Assembly that his country would no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent...
McKinley was known above all for his inscrutability. He gave almost all the people he met the impression that he agreed with them, and rarely allowed even his closest advisers to know what he was thin...
Exceptionalism—the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations—was to them not a platitude, but...