The World

A tariff makes something more expensive and thus less attractive to would-be consumers, who will either buy something similar at a lower price—be it made by a domestic producer or another foreign producer—or forgo the purchase. Tariffs can be put in place for many reasons, be it to protect firms that could otherwise not hold their own against impor

Modern trade pacts can be traced back to the post–World War II period, when, in 1947, twenty-three countries signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. GATT’s emphasis was on reducing tariffs inhibiting the flow of manufactured goods, and in that the organization succeeded: the average global import tariff on goods has more than halved, fal

The cost of World War II was, like its predecessor, extraordinarily high. More than 15 million soldiers died in the fighting; a far larger number of civilians also perished, including 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, the signature genocide of this or any era. France, the United Kingdom, and Italy each lost approximately half a million people, mostl

It is possible that the United States also entered the war in part owing to the publication in early 1917 of a secret diplomatic message (the so-called Zimmermann Telegram) in which Germany promised Mexico the territory of Texas and several other states in return for its entering an alliance with Germany should the United States enter the war on th

The Taliban government that controlled Afghanistan provided a home to the terrorist group al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. administration at the time, that of George W. Bush, demanded the Taliban hand over al-Qaeda members who were operating out of Afghanistan, and when it refused to do so, the United States joined forces with m

History was unfolding in Asia as well as Europe. In China, popular protests against the Qing dynasty, which had failed to modernize China or push back against foreign encroachments on Chinese sovereignty, led to its toppling in 1912, ending some two thousand years of imperial rule. Chinese Nationalists (a non-Communist movement inclined toward auth

For its part, the Soviet Union did what it could to promote anti-American, Communist regimes around the Western Hemisphere and succeeded in Cuba and Nicaragua. It had the advantage of aiding individuals and movements who were fighting against unpopular authoritarian governments that offered little to their people. But again the Soviet help was just

Thus, a second area of national and international activity has grown up in which local and national governments take steps to decrease their vulnerability to existing or projected effects of climate change. Such steps, termed adaptation, can involve such things as discouraging or prohibiting people from living in coastal areas that are vulnerable t

NATO, or more formally the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was built to maintain the security tie between the United States and Europe that was central to victory in both World War I and World War II and that continued to be necessary given Soviet strength and European weakness.

In the end, it took the Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, to bring the United States into the war. Given the alliance among Japan, Germany, and Italy, the U.S. declaration of war on…

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