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The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. And that learning to live within that condition—let’s call it history—requires adaptation to incompatibles. That’s where grand strategy helps. For “i
... See moreJohn Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
The UN Security Council is of little relevance to most of the world’s conflicts, and international arrangements have failed to contend with the challenges associated with globalization. The world has put itself on the record as against genocide and has asserted a right to intervene when governments fail to live up to the responsibility to protect t
... See moreRichard Haass • The World
Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts. Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the e
... See moreCharles Krauthammer • Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics
it is organized to focus on a response to that particular threat, rather than dissipate its attention. In World War II, it was Germany and Japan. In the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union and China.
George Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, o
... See moreDavid Halberstam • The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)
The paper served as a primer on the administration’s foreign
Michael B. Oren • Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide
The secret war, the scientific struggle, depended on that. Spying was a performance and the costume, the voice, the initial entrance were as vital as the lines themselves.
Matthew Richardson • The Scarlet Papers: The Times Thriller of the Year 2023
Identifying the major participants in a coming great-power war, should it happen, is no Black Swan mystery. It’s more like a Gray Rhino, to use policy analyst Michele Wucker’s evocative phrase—something which, when we pause to think about it, is big, obvious, and galloping straight toward us. To list the roster on one side, we need only refer to Am
... See moreNeil Howe • The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End
Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady’s The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army (Ambinder and Grady, 2012).