The business of newspapers isn't as interesting as journalists think. Not only that, few can write properly, few report thoroughly, and many are frustrated at being chroniclers rather than the persons being covered.
Wild speculations by amateur psychoanalysts painted Hitler as a pervert of every caste and creed. A new book unearths the surprisingly mundane truth: he adored the young, fun-loving, Elizabeth Arden–wearing, cigarette-smoking Eva Braun.
According to cyberutopians like Clay Shirky, everything from Wikileaks to Twitter is making us better, kinder, gentler human beings. But technology is a tool that can be manipulated by both peaceful protesters and repressive governments.
The Social Animal is an instruction manual for politicians, the chief virtue of which is that it is practically useless. Faced with geopolitical and economic upheaval, the New York Times columnist offers a reassuring refuge from reality.
As Europe secularized and the global South becomes the new market for potential converts, Christianity is undergoing a painful evolution.
A reflexive hostility to Western religion permeates the chattering classes. If only rationality ruled the day, they argue, the world would be at peace.
For those who think we live in an age of unrestrained violence, think again. At least according to one Harvard psychologist, mankind has learned to rein in its inner demons. But is Pinker’s civilization-as-progress thesis too good to be true?
Peter Beinart's books represent the intellectual equivalent of what nutritionists call the empty-calorie principle.
Contrary to Harris’s latest screed, there is no such thing as a science-based universal morality. And abolishing religion will do nothing to rid mankind of its ills.
George Kennan presents a study in paradox. With penetrating scholarship, John Lewis Gaddis explores Kennan’s complex psychology and provides an intellectual history of the Cold War in his comprehensive and wonderfully written biography.
The human-rights movement is nothing more than an unattainable utopian dream used to justify moral ends through ruinous wars of intervention.
Historians have recently begun to see the twentieth century as lasting from 1914 to 1989 (the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe) or to 1991 (the end of the Soviet Union), what Eric Hobsbawm in his new book calls "the short twentieth century.
How a fictional secret agent came to epitomize the Anglo-American relationship and interpret the evolving Cold War for the movie-going masses.
In Blacklisted: A Journalist's Life in Central Europe, Paul Lendvai recounts his remarkable journey from the Nazi wartime death marches, to his days as a young communist apologist, and on to his later "crusade of information" against comm
Well-trained historians need not be specialists, as P.M.H. Bell's illuminating new volume confirms.
Davies has written a work worthy of the remarkable continent with which he deals; a continent that is now struggling to redefine and reunify itself, and whose cultures have been released once again to meet and mingle.
A fictional 19th-century detective disdains Russia's intelligentsia and preaches a bourgeois sermon on virtue and responsible citizenship to Russia's nascent middle class.
At one time conservatives like Castlereagh, nationalists like Bismarck and internationalists like Gladstone were all convinced that international order would be torn apart unless the interests of Great Powers were respected and kept in balance. Th
Scholars of international relations have only recently begun to appreciate the power of religion. Their next step is to get religion right. No longer mysterious and magical, modernity has demystified the Higher Power.
When Isaiah Berlin died last November, there was a cascade of adulatory essays and obituaries, all of them well deserved. Yet there is a sense in which the wrong Berlin was being celebrated; or if not exactly the wrong Berlin then only a half of h
Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography depicts a Bismarck rife with contradictions. Still, it comes dangerously close to conflating the mad Junker’s cautious conservatism with the führer’s nihilism. There is more to Germany than destiny alone.
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations might not only be about the future. It actually might help shape it.
Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography is a most revealing book--wittingly and otherwise. He turns out to have been a most catholic fellow.
Primo Levi's biographers offer no improvement on the original, whose unabridged voice we need to heed more than ever.
John Clark and Aaron Wildavsky, The Moral Collapse of Communism: Poland as a Cautionary Tale (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1990).
Two recent histories of Nazi Germany shore up the dyke against the rising flood of "Germany as victim" revisionism.
Philip Bobbit's grand historical vision remains impressive, until one examines its history.
Noel Malcolm, in his extraordinary book--the best available in English on the background of the Bosnian war--refutes dozens of misconceptions about the country's history.
A history of the Hungarians, by a Hungarian, for everyone.
Nowadays, history is regularly written by the victims, usually in service of a political agenda. Long-remembered slights poison political debate, often with violent consequences.
Twentieth-century atrocities receive an unrewarding spin for the television age.
There is no simple answer to the causes of terrorism. But three books offer insight into the complexities of man and his motivation to kill. These explanations come not from academic tomes, nor expositions by the burgeoning cottage industry of ter
Experts Peña and Pham square off on Iraq.
Counterinsurgency is not a cure-all. Local allegiances will always trump the might of the invader. Washington’s insistence that the troops turn Kabul into a functioning democracy will only erode the military's fighting spirit.
Chace's Acheson is encompassing, graceful and prodigiously researched and annotated.
A specter is haunting Europe and John Laughland: the specter of Europe united, of nations abolished, of the administration of things replacing the government of people. He has written a book about it that is intriguing...
In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma equivocates when clarity would have enlightened readers.
Anti-interventionists allege our leaders traded a strong, austere republic for a weak and sprawling empire predicated on a military might that could not match our own ambitions. This narrative negates real threats and real victories.
It may be that the best one-volume history of the United States has been penned by a Brit. David Reynolds takes us into the very essence of what it means to be an American, offering wisdom perhaps only possible from an outsider.
Obama’s attack on the Supreme Court is just the latest in a long history of presidential power grabs. Gordon Wood dissects John Yoo.
From this memoir we learn just how confident Margaret Thatcher is in her understanding of Britain's problems and her ability to find solutions. She knows her strengths.
Lawrence of Arabia, that romantic, kaffiyeh-wearing, desert-dwelling symbol of Arab nationalism, was nothing more than the ringleader in a sideshow of a sideshow.
The best way to master history is to live through it. Michael Howard’s Captain Professor speaks to the past and present.
While both Rosenblatt and Horowitz have had second thoughts about the 1960s, their assessments of this fateful decade are strikingly different.
Today's conservatives can learn from their Tory forbears.
Bernard Lewis dissects the travails of the Muslim world and finds that the problem is not what Islam has done to Muslims, but what Muslims have done to Islam.
The definitive portrait--and vindication--of Turkey's founding father.
The counterinsurgency that worked--a century ago.
Edward Teller's life vindicated Francis Bacon's prediction of the man of science in the public realm. Teller's memoir would vindicate Teller.
Robert Bork warns that judicial activism is going global. He doesn't know the half of it.
Pedestrian books can sometimes serve salutary purposes.
Awash in Wilsonian hubris, the State Department’s meandering and militaristic QDDR will ensure Foggy Bottom remains second-rate—both inside the Beltway and overseas.
Brands deserves congratulation on his new biography, an honest, enjoyable, sympathetic portrait of our twenty-sixth president, aside from a melodramatic prologue and some unfortunate bows to modern psychology.
The book is a novel, one of several by Mr. Banville, and yet as Knopf's classification suggests (and as it seems, in keeping with the literary rage these days), it is not to be taken as a novel only.
Marton's qualifications to write a book about the Middle East are slightly higher than Bernadotte's were to make peace there, but in the end it comes to the same: two boy scouts setting up pup-tents in minefields.
Washington has lived by leaks and rumors for a very long time, but until the collapse of communism there was one person in town with whom it was always safe to let your hair down.
Recent proposals for beefing up Democratic national-security policy offer little in the way of fresh strategic thinking.
Just why is Latin America the way it is? Indeed why is it not like anywhere else? The questions are addressed by three Latin American authors.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship is based on more than just oil—it hinges directly on common core interests.
Wishful thinking is preventing the formation of a responsible American foreign-policy strategy.
Policy decisions suffer when the rational center remains silent and catchphrases take over the debate.
Jacob Heilbrunn analyzes a spate of recent Reagan biographies, which demonstrate that neither George W. Bush nor any of the presidential candidates can lay claim to Reagan's unique legacy.
A review of The J Curve by Ian Bremmer and Winning the Un-War by Charles Peña. Two authors turn their critical, discerning eye on the foibles of U.S. counter-terror and nation-building strategy. Just one offers a constructive course
With regards to Tehran, it is America that has been the constant bungler.
The much-vaunted surge has made Iraq safer. But more boots in the desert is not the only reason security has improved. As U.S. forces get ready to leave, we have to face some inconvenient political realities.
Books on "the new Iraq " are already flying off the printer, but are they any good?
William Taubman's biography of Chairman Khrushchev combines original research and good sense to produce the best last word so far on the late Soviet leader.
The death of the Ottoman Empire was a case of suicide, not homicide.
A look at the poverty of some contending economic fundamentalisms.
The typical vision of Chechnya: a violence-filled land of terrorists fighting for independence from the Kremlin’s iron grip. The reality is a land torn between nationalism and a Russian civic identity.
China has striven to moderate at least the appearence of its global ambitions.
The secretly constructed record of the Communist Party decision to crack down on Tiananmen protesters rings true to an old China hand.
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, a 1904 novel about Westerners and indigenous inhabitants of an imaginary South American country, skillfully defines and dissects the problems of the Third World.
Impressive historical scholarship on migration cannot save Professor Hoerder from the miasma of current academic fashions.
Three distinct schools of thought shape the debate on how America should best pursue its post-Cold War interests in the world.
Quantifying the Great War doesn't really get one very far.
As this important volume demonstrates, the overriding requirement of the era was not guts but wisdom. On that score, the Kennedys and their lieutenants flunked.
Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 352 pp.
Rockefeller, Lindsay, Scranton—just three of the “moderates” who failed to keep the GOP from the clutches of Goldwater and Nixon. Geoffrey Kabaservice laments their defeat with a wistfulness that obscures from him their true frustration.
Review of Donald Prater's Thomas Mann: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
The inevitability of republicanism as the answer to infinite governmental woes seemed clear. Yet the belief that the world abhors an ideological vacuum was mistaken.
Unflinching loyalty to the Bush Doctrine leads Robert Kaufman astray in his study of American foreign policy—and Truman, Reagan and Bush do not make a three-of-kind.
Americans have never stopped asking themselves what sets them apart from the rest. Rightly so. America was different in its formative years, and it's different now.
When it comes to Europe's gilded future, success is always just around the corner. Europeanists need to wake up--or risk being left behind by an unlikely coalition.
William Pfaff, The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Fury of Nationalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 256 pp.
Beyond the latest rows, institutional paralysis and financial incompetence, the scars of war have plainly not all been healed. Is there a deeper collapse of European self-confidence?
Churchill remains a figure of fascination, especially for Americans. Five new books should sate our appetites for awhile.
H.R. McMaster has written a scathing indictment of America's civilian and military leadership during the early phases of the Vietnam war, and he speaks--to a military audience, at any rate--with unique moral authority.
What we have here is a book on literature, plus two or three pamphlets that contain much ranting, all barely held together in a bad case of intellectual sprawl.
We see ourselves as an insular nation, but other countries know otherwise—and are attempting to undermine U.S. global hegemony.
Europe and its Muslims face three possible futures.
Why the Cold War was so instrumental in Europe's success.
François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: W.
We must prepare for the ultimate threat to nations. Thoughts from one of America’s leading grand strategists.
Morris turns to the origins of the one-state and two-state conceptions. It helps explain how the Israelis and Palestinians got themselves into this intractable conflict in the first place.
Whether it's global warming, racism or deficit spending, beware of the experts you're listening to. They know far less than they claim.
The English-language news channel of Al Jazeera consistently is first on the scene of Mideastern developments, and its journalists provide smart analysis of global events. It may be today’s most influential television-news operation.
Everyone agrees that Iran is a threat. What makes Ilan Berman stand out?
The Democratic rebirth of the virtue of FDR's realism.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a great president. Is Conrad Black a great biographer?
Managing the Pentagon and managing wars are two different things, a lesson Robert McNamara learned the hard way.
Eliot Cohen's look at the greatest democratic statesman of recent centuries affirms Clemenceau's quip that war is too important to be left to the generals--even American generals.
As the Great Recession gnaws at our very belief in the ability of capitalism to raise us to ever-escalating levels of wealth and prosperity, Keynes's no-longer-viable financial prescriptions are being resurrected.
Mearsheimer and Walt should have included more field work in their research. Yet their book still deserves to be read and discussed.
Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend. Quelquefois.
Jeremy Seal, A Fez of the Heart (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.
This consciousness of cultural mission affected French writers, giving them a comforting idea of their own importance. For their message was not restricted to purely aesthetic impressions.
Pat Buchanan will not go away; he is confident that economic nationalism will capture one or both major parties. In fact, he believes the tide has already turned, as demonstrated by the refusal of Congress to grant President Clinton "fast track" a
In this new book, Cairncross is a little breathless about the electronic communications that will conjure new worlds into existence. Nevertheless, because her text is well informed and her prose lucid, and because the technological developments ar
Pangloss and Cassandra debate the global village.
Think airpower is the military strategy cure-all? Martin van Creveld begs to differ. His latest offering argues that aerial armaments have failed to confer a decisive advantage, tricking aggressors into believing that victory will be easy.
Yes, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
George Tenet’s memoir is basically about two stories: the fight against Al-Qaeda both before and after 9/11 and the Iraq War. And on these matters, his story—if not always his performance—is basically on target.
Two young geniuses found a company. They build the greatest search engine ever. But they are greedy and petulant. They believe themselves infallible and unstoppable. Now they are under assault. Is it time to bid Google goodbye?
Pierre Hassner's review of my book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is highly unfavorable, which is his right to be. But it is also a mixture of disingenuousness, inaccuracy, misrepresentation, and calumny.
The story of the AK-47 reads like a Stalinist myth. Whether it's true or not, the gun is a sure sign of humanity's penchant for violent solutions to conflict.
Friedrich Hayek's ideas, particularly those set out in The Road to Serfdom, have been subject to extraordinary ups and downs in learned, as well as in popular and political, estimation.
Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
Iraq has a long and tortured history. Home to the tyrant, the origins of despotism lie in the primordial ooze of the Mesopotamian swamp. Yet for a brief moment fifty years ago, the land of two rivers experienced democracy.
Kissinger's record of the Ford years and of the demise of détente.
Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
A portrait of a dedicated senator and steadfast cold warrior.
At this point, it is too early to tell whether to be optimistic or whether the only healthy response to our current domestic economic discontents will be to lower expectations. Perhaps books like The End of Affluence and The Good Life
Everyone knows about Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. But what about their intellectual godfather? A look at the original democracy-promoting liberal defense hawk, JFK and LBJ advisor Walt Rostow.
Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance--The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).
Christopher Coker's Twilight of the West looks at present geopolitical trends and predicts the West's dissolution; David Gress, in From Plato to Nato, sees them as yet another episode in the long struggle between the mainstream W
Radical Islam is its own worst enemy. It will marginalize itself unless the United States overreacts.
Our risk-averse culture regards the Great War with pity and horror. Adam Hochschild too adopts this war-is-hell view. But nationalism, patriotism and camaraderie motivated Europe’s citizens to take up arms.
The new game of ethnic politics in foreign polics is a curious development--no less than American leaders' support of it.
Will France call the whole thing off?
Conservatism is once again facing an identity crisis. The recent passing of William F. Buckley, Jr., offers a perfect opportunity to look back at the movement, with its antecedents, its birth, its triumphs and now its potential demise.
Andrew Bacevich's American Empire is really two books in one: one quite good, the other quite inexplicable.
We thought the lessons of Vietnam could never be unlearned. But Washington warmongering heeds no warnings, plunging America into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan. The depths of dysfunction behind these decisions seemingly know no bounds.
Western society tends to see disaster all around, from climate change to terrorism. But we live in a time of unbridled prosperity. Our age has nowhere near as great a measure of crisis as the age of total war.
Finally, a much-needed study of the other Vietnam War.
John Ikenberry's latest—Liberal Leviathan—offers a relentless mantra on the merits of the global liberal order while painting over the inherent tension between U.S. power and multilateral cooperation.
For the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper—whose poison pen spared no ego and whose toxic overconfidence relegated him to a perpetual almost-ran—refusing to become the false prophet of a grand new theory of history was his greatest triumph.
Al J. Venter traces the history of the Iranian nuclear project.
Is fundamentalist Islam waxing or waning? Perhaps both.
Robert Kaplan advocates a pagan ethos for American statesmen in the 21st century, but not all pagans think alike.
John Lukacs offers an intimate portrait of one of America's great strategists in George Kennan.
Suicide terrorism may be more rational than meets the eye.
An eminent realist reacts to a pre-eminent's vision for 21st-century geopolitics.
English has conquered the world. As it spreads, it is seeping into foreign cultures, mutating into a global language. Its footprint across the globe is only set to expand.
A malign biography of a flawed but hugely gifted man.
Three decades of Sino-American relations: the view from the Oval Office.
We live in a world where the failures of a botched freedom agenda are everpresent. Yet no one in the foreign-policy establishment of either party seems to understand the changing realities of international affairs—or articulate coherent policy alt
Enraged bloggers and grandstanding politicians alike denounce the Koran as a glorified terrorist manifesto. Philip Jenkins’s new tome challenges this simplistic logic, analyzing the Bible’s equally—and often shockingly—bloodthirsty passages.
Robert Kuttner, The End of Laissez-Faire: National Purpose and the Global Economy After the Cold War (New York: Alfred A.
Michael Lind's first book is the "first manifesto" of a "real, not merely metaphorical revolution in politics and society" leading to a new America to be known as Trans-America.
Whereas the principal aim of American nuclear policy during the Cold War was to deter a strong and aggressive Soviet Union, the nuclear risks we face today stem from Russian weakness.
As a result of America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have lost the global clout we derived from our role in World War II—for good.
With great power comes great responsibility. But Washington is adrift and our country in search of a strategy. Foreign-policy heavyweight Les Gelb wittily channels a master to update the classic realpolitik definition of power.
The Bush administration assumed that the Sandinistas would win in Nicaragua, writes Robert Kagan in his massive study of the Nicaraguan drama.
As the GOP's leading contender in 2012, can Sarah Palin channel the optimism of her hero Reagan without abandoning her bromides against the tyranny of the ruling class?
Geoffrey Roberts treads through morally hazardous territory portraying Stalin as a great statesman.
Maximilian II managed to be both ahead of his time and behind it simultaneously. His life warns us against allowing ourselves to fall into a similar predicament.
Last summer, Russia and Georgia came to blows. Tbilisi’s pro-American president believed NATO would protect him in a fight with the big, bad bear.
Mearsheimer and Walt fail to capture the realities of policy formation.
Gandhi cuts a saintly figure in the modern imagination. Joseph Lelyveld’s controversial biographical account presents a more dispassionate perspective of the Father of the Indian Nation. An exaggerated creation myth is revealed.
A trio of books proposes intriguing reasons for economic growth--national pride, surplus labor and investment security--but none parses the novelty of the virtual state.
Is there anything the United States can learn from this ancient, sordid affair that put an empire on the path to destruction?
The sky is falling, really.
Ernest Gellner's Conditions of Liberty is the best treatment of civil society to emerge from a post-Cold War perspective. Gellner himself these days is in Prague much of the time, studying the process of regeneration from the inside.
There is much room for debate on the soundness of neoconservative policies. But a serious assessment of neocons and their role in the Bush Administration is a necessary starting point.
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s tour through Jerusalem demonstrates that the conquerors of history saw this city as a treasure worth countless lives. The current face-off between Israelis and Palestinians is only the latest intractable conflict.
Alan Furst recreates the atmosphere of Europe's second Dark Ages (1933-45) as few others have. Today, Western civilization is again under attack, and Furst can teach us a great deal.
Gilles Kepel's internationally respected expertise in Islamic matters simply does not extend to their infusion within Western politics and society.
Review of Jane Kramer's The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1994).
Latin America’s post-independence history has been a bumpy ride. Things are getting better thanks to solid growth of late, but inequality threatens to bring the whole thing down.
Europeans came to believe everything beautiful emanated from the Caucasus. The journey of their swarthy Mediterranean forebears was transformed into a caricature of the white marble statues they left behind.
Bernstein and Munro reject the view that Sino-American relations are fundamentally sound because China is weak, needs us as a trading partner, and relies on the United States to hold back Japan.
Two of the authors of Ethical Realism and With All Our Might debate America’s future foreign-policy trajectory, weighing the relevance of realism, internationalism and militarism.
The Obama administration has finally decided to do something about climate change. Yet the assumptions of environmental policy are informed by a flawed morality that has all the religious hallmarks of sin and guilt.
R. J. B. Bosworth’s most recent tome navigates the changing politics and identity of Rome, from papal preserve to Fascist enclave to republican capital, deftly illustrating that the Eternal City is forever a work in progress.
Review of Robert Skidelsky and John Maynard Keynes' The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937(New York: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1994).
Stalin: The Dictator. The Revolutionary. The Homebody? The USSR’s Cold War ambitions have been greatly exaggerated. Worldwide Marxist revolution played second fiddle to control of the Continent.
From the bikini to the doomsday clock, with the advent of nuclear weapons everything around us seemed to change. Contrarian political scientist John Mueller takes issue with this conventional view of the Atomic Age.
Many are inclined to give José Ortega y Gasset credit for prescience that he does not deserve.
Smith Hempstone's narrative of his diplomatic "arm wrestling" with a recalcitrant Moi regime between 1989 and 1993 is lucid, witty and comprehensive.
Rather surprisingly, William Odom's Collapse of the Soviet Military provides the most comprehensive and serious examination to date of the Soviet military's unexpected passivity during the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Iran was a glorious empire, but has also been a conquered nation. This complex mixture of pride and insecurity continues to define the Republic.
The Tom Clancys of Turkey have a clear and present bias.
America has at times oriented itself to the East, at others to the West. But what we have always had is a sense of our manifest destiny. And now the ideals of California—nihilism with a suntan—seem to be our primary ideological export.
James Ceaser's Reconstructing America locates the "real America" in the ideas and values of the Founders. But a purely political conception of America is inadequate.
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
HBO’s new documentary provides an evenhanded and riveting picture of wounded veterans’ struggles.
The Russian revolution of the nineties brought economic phantasmagoria, not reform. The leadership's hands are dirty, and so are the West's.
Two optimistic portrayals of the international future--by political scientists Joseph Nye and Michael Mandelbaum--go under a historian's scalpel.
Is the United States really as strong and wise, and "Old Europe" as weak and wooly-headed, as many American foreign policy pundits and practitioners think? Another way to read Transatlantic realities.
This book is a record of disappointment in love.
Graham Allison paints a frightful picture of nuclear terrorism. But all is not yet lost.
Anti-Americanism takes many forms -- most of them unfair. But as long as it strives to be a City upon a Hill, America Must learn to live with it.
A spate of books provides a welcome opportunity to reassess Nixon.
Carnes Lord Takes the gloves back off Machiavelli and gives us something we can use.
A sweeping institutional history of pst-war settlements leaves something to be desired, namely, more history.
The conventional wisdom says Sayyid Qutb is the forefather of modern-day Islamic fundamentalism. What is less known is how the thinker's intense anti-Semitism and contempt for female sexuality contributed to this vulgar worldview.
Instead of turning back Islamism, military interventions lead large swaths of local populations to pick up arms in defense of their homelands
Who doesn’t want to know whether the Dow will close above ten thousand at year’s end, whether the Saudis can maintain their oil production, whether China will rise and Russia will fall, or whether a new dictator lurks in the Middle East?
Despite protestations to the contrary, Reagan did have a grand strategy.
Despite the questioning of specific actions and policies, it remains indisputable that a combination of the times and Shultz's own strength of character made him one of our most successful secretaries of state.
Reckless War-Making; Review of Sergei N.
"Getting the wind up", is an old British expression for panicking.
The conservative movement is cracking up—just look at three memoirs of former administration officials. These new books may engage in justification and self-aggrandizement, but they do prescribe salves for fixing the conservative experiment.
The improbable ascent, sudden collapse and subsequent re-imagination of Prussia.
Geoffrey Roberts, the author of Stalin's Wars, responds to Andrew J. Bacevich's review of the book in the September/October issue of The National Interest.
Andrew J. Bacevich laments American militarism.
Fascism did not die with Hitler and Mussolini in World War II. As recent events show, understanding what fascism means in the 21st century is a lesson worth learning.
For many, Israel’s founding is shrouded in mysticism. But there is a battle raging among the historians of the Holy Land. The current stalemate is a story of bad actions on both sides. Beware those who rewrite narratives.
Energized Shi‘a represent a powerful challenge to Sunni extremism and jihadism.
America's founding is a gripping tale of rivalry, treachery and ultimately triumph. The divisive politics of today are nothing compared to those now celebrated on the cliffs of Mt. Rushmore.
Tom DeLay may not see any problems with the phrase, "one vote, one person, one time", but the rest of America might.
Why "keeping it in the family" remains popular under dictatorships--and democracies.
Preventing the spread of atomic weaponry is less in our control than we think.
Michael Mandelbaum, The Dawn of Peace in Europe (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996)"We must fulfill the promise of our time: an undivided Europe of free nations.
Two of the books reviewed here describe how Joshua Muravchik and the late Eric Nordlinger read the post-Soviet map and would have us travel upon it. Both recommend sharp turns at high speeds. The third contains the counsel of Peter Rodman, a man l
Fouad Ajami's new book argues that the Arabs have defeated themselves by a blind adherence to anachronistic ideologies of self-glorification, both nationalist and Islamist.
Walter Rusell Mead glosses over British history in God and Gold; Brendan Simms paints a clearer picture in Three Victories and a Defeat.
Russian nationalism is the most important but least understood force to have emerged from the shadows following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Yevgeny Primakov hates to say "I told you so", but....
Christopher Hitchens' diatribe against Henry Kissinger should disappoint even the most credulous of the statesman's opponents. Effective polemic this is not.
After WWI, Britain and France made the Arab world the object of history, not its subject. James Barr’s new book shows that the Middle East was born crazy. Later misunderstandings and manipulations were laid atop well-worn grooves.
Superficial analysis says America's universities are on a precipitous decline. The truth is that the U.S. academy has become a paragon of learning to which all the world aspires.
Seeing Red, Review of John E.
There is something indescribably wrong, we're compelled to feel, about a man completely enslaving his spirit to that of another man. The Remains of the Day, in both its literary and movie form, tells a highly didactic story. With all the respect d
The chances of another cycle of optimism, overconfidence, hubris, panic and a long period of pessimism are high.
Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990).
From Carthage to Bosnia, Persia to Palestine, tales of warfare and hubris, excess and murder line the Mediterranean. David Abulafia proffers up a sweeping narrative steeped in culture, commerce and the struggle for dominance on the Great Sea.
Marxists are not alone in stressing that the wellsprings of a state's foreign policy almost always come from its domestic social, economic, and political systems, a perspective that has been reinforced by the recent arguments.
Perhaps the most important argument made by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their new book concerns the impact of the lobby on the political discourse in the United States.
Despite predictions to the contrary, America's superpower status remains uncontested.
What clues can past episodes of economic integration provide about the future of globalization? Three recent works offer answers.
A group of five Americans gathered in Paris a century ago to negotiate an end to the Spanish-American War.
An Irishman of indefatiguable mind and rare sensibilities.
Marsh is a gifted journalist and his command of events is most impressive, but he does not have the same respect for ideas as he does for the nitty-gritty of reportage.
Gone is Churchill's "enigma wrapped in a mystery." Russia's media and many of its archives, along with its borders, have opened.
Summer reading suggestions from: Irving Kristol, Owen Harries, James Schlesinger, Samuel Huntington, Robert Tucker, Midge Decter, Michael Mandelbaum and others.
Hollywood romanticizes terror - Nir Rosen exposes it.
Can women keep us safe? For all the talk of a rise of women to positions of power, there is still a dearth of the female perspective in national security. With the unprecedented appointment of three women to some of the highest posts in the new ad
Is the West doomed to go the way of all other civilizations--into history's bin?
Before we can begin to fashion a sensible Iran policy, the first task is to grasp the full dimensions of what Iran is all about.
Counting the victims of communism obfuscates more than it clarifies.
Two primers on economics reveal a lingering philosophical divide in the intellectual imagination of our time.
Can John Mearsheimer's analysis of "offensive realism" explain or guide U.S. foreign policy? Better, perhaps, than the author realizes.
In the ongoing argument between foreign policy realists andidealists, the just-war tradition of moral reasoning about the use offorce has played a crucial mediating role for centuries.
Robert M. Gates entered CIA toward the end of its best years, and the history he recounts of the ensuing twenty-odd years is strewn with untidy crises and a mix of CIA successes and disasters, brilliant insights, and woeful miscalls. Gates describ
Rajan Menon evaluates the latest works on the future of East Asia and its impact on the world. Is Pax Americana in decline, and are we on the verge of a Pax Sinica?
In retrospect, the film Green Berets serves rather neatly, in conjunction with reviews in the New York Times and other high-toned publications, to illustrate the period's sharp split between elite and mass opinion on the Vietnam War.
Senator Moynihan has expanded his appendix to the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy report into an elegant, quotable, scholarly, and timely book.
Walter Russell Mead's new book deploys the ideas and heirs of Hamilton, Wilson, Jefferson and Jackson to illuminate the future of U.S. foreign policy.
Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture provides ample documentation as to the importance of culture as a component of human capital, one that is critical in determining individual and national performance. In his usual feisty way, Sowell is eager to deb
Today, looking back, The Decline of the West can be seen to stand at the gate whereby entered such pervasive intellectual fashions as postmodernist relativism, multiculturalism, and hostile suspicion of dead white European males.
As the debate over global warming gets vicious yet again, climate expert David Victor explains the real unknowns and real solutions.
A dissection of the few pluses and many minuses of the crusading approach to American foreign policy.
America has thrived thanks to its Anglo-Protestant culture. But does that culture carry the seeds of its own demise?
Stopping torture and changing the policies of the Bush administration may not be enough. With a whole new type of terrorist bred from extraordinary rendition and torture, the last eight years may well prove inescapable.
Although the syllogism conveys the essence of Fukuyama's argument, it does so at the cost of neglecting the book's broad sweep, sharp insights, and wide-ranging scholarship.
Marlin Fitzwater was the most effective and well-liked press secretary since John F. Kennedy's Pierre Salinger. Fitzwater spent six years working for two presidents of markedly different public styles, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and lived to t
The Dayton Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia--or, more precisely, that produced a ceasefire which has so far lasted almost three years--is a flawed agreement, and its flaws are the product of a flawed policy.
Jay Lovestone, America's leading cold warrior, was self-effacing and effective.
Vichy functionary, socialist politician, conservative president--the story of an amazingly adaptable Frenchman.
Benny Morris reviews Gilad Sharon's biography of his father, Ariel Sharon.
Here are four Quarantottesco books, all Liberty on the Barricades, beards striking poses, étude revolutionnaire throbbing away.
Review of Walter Laqueur's Fascism: Past, Present Future (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996); Roger Eatwell's Fascism: A History (New York: Allen Lane, 1996).
Nations, like people, view their past through emotional and psychological prisms. The normal course is for national history to become heroic myth--a saga of obstacles overcome, evil vanquished, national character triumphant.
Modern Western discord stems from differing Enlightenment experiences.
Modernizing the Provincial City does not tell us anything we did not already know about how the French became and are becoming what they have been and are.
The Peope who proved Stalin wrong.
A "new history" of the Third Reich fails to understand the true nature of the regime.
Every president faces the daunting task of putting together a team that can lead America while transitioning to the role of leader of the free world. Given the way the new administration’s cabinet is shaping up and the heap of global crises, Obama
Itamar Rabinovich's The Brink of Peace is a masterly chronicle of the Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations of 1993-96, in which Israel and Syria--and America--once staked so much hope.
A book by former–Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov gives an insider’s account of espionage and intrigue in the Middle East.
An exaggerated indictment of Israel's home-grown critics.
The Bush administration may have gotten a lot wrong, but there is still hope for America’s policy in the Middle East. Three books shed some light on how the United States can get over Iraq.
Washington, London and Dublin all declare that the peace process must continue--no matter how many people get killed. Gerry Adams completely agrees.
Martin Jacques’s just-released tome breathlessly informs us that China will soon rule the world. Its culture will dominate the West. Its military will threaten our own. Its authoritarian system will become an alternative to liberal democracy.
Yet another contentious history from Norman Davies.
War on the silver screen. A new film refights the Gulf War--but this time for a higher purpose/
Despite Goldhagen's extraordinary claims, he himself concedes in his unwittingly revealing afterword that he is not presenting much in the way of original research.
Kaplan has interesting things to say about what it is like to travel by public conveyances and rub shoulders with ordinary, common people in some of the earth's poorest and most stressful human environments.
It is understandable that Donald Prater, in his new biography of Mann, should have emphasized the novelist's political evolution, which was so closely associated with the history of Germany.
A new biography of a talented and enlightened despot.
Three European intellectuals who were also honorable men.
This is a work of criticism ranging over the more fashionable social sciences and humanities, assessing and mostly rejecting them as unsuitable for elucidating the Japanese political system and berating their exponents for ignoring that system in
Two biographies clarify questions about Sumner Welles' long and spectacular career
Irwin has attempted to write an intellectual history of free trade. The book divides into accounts of the origins of the doctrine and the controversies it has aroused--fifteen sections in all, examining in detail the ideas of leading theorists fro
Springtime for Churchill.
Ukraine's political demagogues are squandering its benign strategic circumstances. They are doing neither well nor good for their unexpected country.
The simple geo-economic idea of the relentlessly adversarial state is a threadbare concept, badly in need of overhauling. And Mr. Luttwak's book is not the first step in that process
Urban's is not a happy memoir. The subtitle, My War Within the Cold War, sums up his theme. The new policy involved years of often bitter struggle with both grotesque reactionaries and Western appeasers.
A realist with a penchant for being spectacularly mistaken.
With the campaign season heating up, David Rivkin says that new books by Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinski might not provide the soundest advice.
Two works address selective amnesia about communist atrocities.
Review of Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1993), 560pp.
As members of the Washington elite go, Colin Powell is an exceptionally attractive person.
Notwithstanding the book's shortcomings, Mearsheimer and Walt do perform an important service in pointing out how difficult it is to produce pragmatic decisions based on national interest.
Discounting the Jewish claim to Jerusalem in the name of evenhandedness is no way to achieve a just settlement.
Walter Cronkite, A Reporter's Life (New York: Alfred A.
Saving Private Ryan challenges our moral seriousness, and that is a daunting thing for a summer film to have done.
There is no shortage of books on security and strategy in a world beset by terror. "Fortunately," writes Harvey Sicherman, "most are short."
In the Cold War, Reagan overreached--and hit the mark.
George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was more consistent with the American tradition than many of his critics claimed, and some of his erstwhile supporters wished. The Wilsonians try to distance themselves from Bush, but they wind up demonstr
This article was originally published on October 26. Given Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's resignation, it is being republished.
Japan is the most consistently misinterpreted major country in the world.
A review of Ike: An American Hero by Michael Korda.
It is hard now for any director to have as foursquare a vision of civilization as John Ford did. Many contemporary directors have tried to revive the Western but they tend to get whipsawed by conflicting cultural vectors.
A legacy besmirched: an ill-informed portrait of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
It's a mistake, argues Fareed Zakaria, to conflate constitutional liberalism with democracy. It's a mistake, says Thomas Carothers, to exaggerate the extent to which that mistake actually characterizes U.S. policy.
