The shah did not tolerate dissent and repressed opposition newspapers, political parties, trade unions, and civic groups. As a result, the only place Iranian dissidents could find a home was in mosque...
The day’s most vivid exchanges were about a delicate but serious matter: the extreme foreignness of native Hawaiians. Both sides used racial arguments. Annexationists said the islanders’ evident savag...
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.
That strengthened the planters’ opposition to democracy, since universal suffrage would most likely have produced a government dominated by nonwhites.
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...
Life is not shaped by what happens to you but by how you react to what happens to you.
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...
Diem complained about all these soldiers I never asked to come here.
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...
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...
Nations just as it breaks the will of human beings.
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...
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...
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...
In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—...
Modern Afghan history shows that an ounce of nation-building prevention will be worth a pound of military-operation cure.