When her brother turned Pearl Harbor over to the Americans in 1887, she wrote in her diary that it was a day of infamy in Hawaiian history.
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...
The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these...
President Johnson soon Americanized the war that resulted in the death of a generation.
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...
Because he had such an ingrained and perhaps exaggerated faith in democracy, he did nothing to repress it.
Until this episode, many Americans had believed that their soldiers were different from others, operating on a higher moral plane because their cause was good.
She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work. Trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes wh...
Opponents denounced the treaty as an imperialist grab of a distant land that shamed American ideals
Nixon pressed him relentlessly, and also because the anti-Allende project fit perfectly with his view of the world and of America’s place in it.
My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right. In
It is cheering to find a newspaper of the great influence and circulation of the Journal that tells the facts as they exist, and ignores the suggestions of various kinds that emanate from sources that...
If it were possible to control the course of world events by deposing foreign governments, the United States would be unchallenged. It has deposed far more of them than any other modern nation. The st...
From the vantage point of history, however, it is clear that most of these operations actually weakened American security. They cast whole regions of the world into upheaval, creating whirlpools of in...
Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led to the installation of a repressive di...
Caught up in the all-encompassing idea of their country’s manifest destiny, they convinced themselves that American influence abroad could only be positive and that anyone who rejected it must be bad.
At a meeting of the National Security Council on March 4, 1953, Eisenhower wondered aloud why it wasn’t possible to get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating u...
The idea of invading Iraq was first urged on him after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, he could not fail to recognize it as a way to have his revenge, complete the job his father had begun,...
Yet Haq was also an outspoken nationalist. His dream was that once the Taliban was overthrown, it would be replaced by a regime free of all outside influence.
Whatever doubts the Americans had about the wisdom of embracing Zia were overwhelmed by their determination to intensify the rebellion in Afghanistan.