Sublime

In 1978, communists in Afghanistan staged a coup, deposing the elected president. Not only was this a revolution led by infidels, it gave the Soviet Union a foothold in the region as it sent troops to support the faltering new regime. Moscow intended this as temporary. “It’ll be over in three to four weeks,” predicted Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet

It did seem that the war was winding down. The disappointment of the 1900 election and sheer exhaustion wore the insurrection thin. Rich, educated Filipinos, meanwhile, started to accommodate themselves to U.S. rule. A month after the 1900 election, more than one hundred members of the colony’s elite formed the Federalist Party, which, as its name

In fact, the Reagan administration was forced to create a major propaganda office, the Office of Public Diplomacy: it’s not the first one in American history, it’s the second, the first was during the Wilson administration in 1917. But this one was much larger, much more extensive, it was a major effort at indoctrinating the public.

George H. W. Bush, the American president at the time the Berlin Wall was dismantled by German protesters in November 1989, deserves special praise for his handling of the Cold War’s final chapter. Bush has been criticized for not making more of these events, but he was careful not to humiliate Communist leaders and risk provoking a situation that

The longer the war went on, the more bases the United States took. For some, as in Latin America, it negotiated deals: building roads and extending aid in exchange for leases. Others it claimed from its allies as a matter of wartime exigency.

During the fifties, this wing had found its principal spokesman in Stevenson, with his elegant prose, his self-deprecating wit. It felt that the United States must take more initiatives to end the arms race, that if America did not recognize Red China it should at least begin to move toward that goal, that nationalism was the new and most potent

Tampoco sabían gran cosa sobre el futuro de la República Dominicana, sólo que los Estados Unidos y, por supuesto, Betancourt, Figueres, Muñoz Marín y quién sabe cuántos dirigentes latinoamericanos más pedían que volviera la democracia a este país antes de levantarle el embargo.

For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times). Cuba also agreed, as part of the price of getting Wood to leave, to lease a forty-five-square-mile port to the United States for military use. Guantánamo Bay, as the leased land was