Sublime

The least successful region has been the Middle East. It was the venue of the first challenge of the era, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saddam Hussein’s aggression was repelled, but he remained in power, as did autocrats in nearly every other country of the region. Efforts to promote peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians mostly failed. Iran e

Clinton was hammered on other aspects of Libya, but it was the incoherence of the policy that hurt her the most. Every time she praised her foreign policy experience, Libya came up.

During the Korean War, Harry Truman went to war without any authorization of Congress. The Cuban missile crisis was a purely presidential decision, as was the 1998 intervention in Kosovo. The congressional role in authorizing war was at least diminished and sometimes omitted.

Any state could be expected to support self-determination when it threatened enemies but be opposed when it threatened allies…

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Eisenhower’s primary objection to the Bricker Amendment was that it would curtail the power of the president to conclude agreements with foreign countries. That would include the status-of-forces agreements that the United States was negotiating with the various NATO countries and with which Ike had firsthand familiarity. To give Congress control o

What won the war, for the Americans, was a Machiavellian insight: that a constitutional monarchy’s humiliation of an absolute monarchy could cause the latter, years later, to rescue a republican revolutionary upstart. Still bitter over France’s loss of North America to the British in 1763, Louis XVI welcomed rebel emissaries to Paris in 1776. The A

With hindsight we know that Wilson’s interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate.

Frankly, I’ve gotten to the point that I am concerned primarily, and almost solely, in some scheme or plan that will permit that oil to keep flowing to the westward. We cannot ignore the tremendous importance of 675,000 barrels of oil a day.