Sublime

The Idea of Decline in Western History. Herman finds a thread across political movements that insist that catastrophe is right around the corner—despite human beings living longer and better by nearly every single possible metric. From the Nazis and race mixing to environmentalists and the death of the earth, Herman reduces them all to the

The occupation radically remade Japan, turning it into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of people from totalitarian military rule,”

The war from 1914 to 1945 was a war among the mightiest industrial powers of the world. And it was a war that had no fundamental purpose. The world had never been so prosperous for the very countries that ended up nearly destroying themselves and killing tens of millions of people. At the core, the two European bloodlettings show the madness of

As of today, there are 193 UN member states, covering nearly the entire world population. Yet in important operational ways, the UN remains a twentieth-century institution guided by rules laid down by the United States in 1945. Most importantly, at the end of World War II, the five victorious allied powers (the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and

Es handelt sich a) um eine Phase schwindender Expansionsdynamik, b) um eine Zeit wachsender Spannungen und Klassenkonflikte, c) um eine Zeit immer häufigerer und heftigerer imperialistischer Kriege und d) um eine Zeit, in der sich Irrationalität, Pessimismus, Aberglauben und Weltfremdheit zunehmend ausbreiten.

In 1999 Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. It was Das Kapital for Smart America. In Friedman’s account, globalization is the organizing system of the post–Cold War era, but, unlike the Cold War, it is the result of technological advances and blind economic forces, not government policies. Rejecting

The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards.