Sublime

Europe, as noted earlier, has in a short span of time gone from being the most predictable and stable region—one where history seemed to have truly ended (as suggested in an influential essay published in 1989 by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama)—to something dramatically different. Democracy, prosperity, and peace all seemed firml

Thus it is not clear whether the absence of wars involving the great powers is an enduring trend or something of an aberration. Some judge this trend as likely to last, arguing wars between countries have become less common because actual or potential costs have gone up, especially in those instances in which nuclear weapons could be introduced. Ot

The man that the Times article reported as being both “sadder” and “wiser” than when he was first imprisoned went on to construct one of humanity’s darkest regimes, ignited a war that killed tens of millions of people, and engineered the world’s first program of mechanized genocide, making him the last person a reader of the Times should think “was

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things, a sensibility that the Lithuanian political theorist Leonidas Donskis called “liquid evil.” Once inevitability was taken for granted, criticism indeed became slippery. What appeared to be critical analysis often assumed that the status quo could not actually change, and