"The United States Has Perhaps Done Worse Than Gaining Nothing"

"Iran has suffered significant damage from U.S. and Israeli military action. But as I and others warned at the outset, killing people and bombing things do not by themselves produce victory. The reality is that the war will close with the regime in Tehran intact and in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; the Strait of Hormuz will remain under the threat of Iranian attacks; Iran will continue to possess significant drone and missile stocks; the regime will maintain the capability to be a state sponsor of terror; and many sanctions will be lifted and billions of dollars in unfrozen assets will flow to Iran. In other words, the Iranians have achieved their key strategic aims—regime survival above all—while the Americans have achieved none of their own."

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic writes that "the United States has been defeated."

"Those Words Feel Even More True Today"

"Fukuyama's pining for past ideological struggles suggests that the Last Man would eventually get bored with technocracy, consumerism, and the stultifying constraints of middle management—and seek new monsters to fight. America's flirtation with an authoritarian leader who promises he alone will fix the nation's problems and restore the country's past glory is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The greatest challenges to liberal democracy would not come from new ideological competitors but rather from complacency. 'Democracies survive and succeed only because people are willing to fight for the rule of law, human rights, and political accountability,' Fukuyama wrote in 2014."

Michael A. Cohen at The New Republic revisits Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?"

"There Is No Such Thing as the Liberal International Order and There Are Hundreds of Books About It”"

"There is certainly much to be concerned about US policy in the coming period. But challenging Trump does not require us to romanticise what went before, or to eulogise a liberal order that never was. We need rather to rethink what we mean by internationalism in this age of assertive nationalism."

Kenan Malik at The Guardian argues that the "liberal international order that too often put order before liberalism."

And George Monbiot writes that "Trump's election was a response to the cruel failures of neoliberalism, but it will also be their ultimate expression."

"He Misled the Public, Mismanaged the Crisis, and Missed Chances to Save Lives"

"These are unserious people in thrall to a sociopathic clown. Trump's greatest test came in the final year of his presidency when the nation faced a true emergency and he failed spectacularly. The U.S. death rate from COVID far exceeded that of peer nations. That was not due to excessive lockdowns or masking. It was due to incompetence in the White House."

Mona Charen at The Bulwark calls for "a great remembering" of Donald Trump's actions in 2020.

As does Timothy Noah at The New Republic.

And at Salon, Heather Digby Parton remembers Trump's whole term.

"So It Goes"

"At the very least, we can learn from Kissinger, who unhesitatingly supported Gulf War One and Gulf War Two, and every war between and since, that the two defining concepts of United States foreign policy—realism and idealism—aren't necessarily opposing values; rather, they reinforce each other. Idealism gets us into the quagmire of the moment; realism keeps us there while promising to get us out; and then idealism returns anew both to justify the realism and to overcome it in the next round."

Greg Grandin at The Nation provides "A People's Obituary of Henry Kissinger."

"Cold War II"

"Great powers, then, must not only have substantial populations and resources, but must also use them to support a world-class national industrial base in a prolonged and sustainable way. Neither state socialist crash programs that peter out over time nor bubbles and booms inflated by central banks in liberal market economies are adequate. To date in the industrial era, developmental states, both authoritarian like present-day China and democratic like the midcentury United States, have been more successful than communist regimes and free market liberal regimes."

Michael Lind at Tablet argues that we "are in a new era of global conflict."

"The Truth Is That Germany's Entire Political Class Is Guilty"

"Germany's stubborn insistence on engaging with the Russian leader in the face of his sustained aggression (a catalog of misdeeds ranging from the invasion of Georgia to assassinations of enemies abroad and war crimes in Syria) was nothing short of a catastrophic blunder, one that will earn Merkel a place in the pantheon of political naiveté alongside Neville Chamberlain."

Matthew Karnitschnig at Politico writes that "Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not just a repudiation of Merkel's chancellorship, however, but of a whole generation of German politicians from across the spectrum."

"The Claim Can Easily Devolve Into an Exercise in Apologetics on Putin's Behalf, Even When It's Not Intended as Such"

"While the United States and the other democracies certainly made their share of mistakes, the main reasons this beautiful friendship went south lay within Russia itself. Among them were the corruption, incompetence, and robber-baron mentality that bedeviled the transition to a market economy; the failure to grapple with, and fully confront, the horrors of the country's Soviet legacy; the profound ambivalence on whether integration into the West should be seen as liberation or occupation; and the widespread sense that the loss of empire was a humiliation and not being feared was a cause for regret. All these trends began early on, when elections for the Russian State Duma in 1993 and 1995 resulted in a parliament dominated by ultranationalist populists and Communists. Putin harnessed and used that energy in a way that, for a while, made many people in Russia and in the West praise him as a guarantor of moderation and stability. Now, the imperial chickens have come home to roost."

Cathy Young at The Bulwark pushes back on the idea that NATO caused Russia to invade Ukraine.

"The Week That Changed the World"?

"That opening paved the way for President J[immy] C[arter] to strip Taiwan (as the Republic of China) of U.S. diplomatic recognition in January 1979 and switch ties to the PRC. That allowed U.S. investors and manufacturers to take advantage of the economic liberalization within Chinese paramount leader D[eng] X[iaoping]'s 'reform and opening' policy that helped transform China from impoverished backwater to the economic powerhouse—and increasingly, the U.S. military rival—that it is today."

Phelim Kine at Politico tries to "parse the lessons of the 50th anniversary of President R[ichard] N[ixon]'s historic trip to China."

And at The Bulwark, Mona Charen adds that "The Verdict Is In: Trump Wasn't Right About China."

"An Augury of the Anti-Liberal Politics and Virulent Nationalism That Would Soon Reach Around the World, Even to America"

"Two decades after September 11, we're no longer those Americans who believed such things would never happen to us, and who, when they did happen, went boldly overseas to rid the world of monsters. Experts now see white-nationalist terrorism as a greater domestic threat than Islamist terrorism. The new fight is for our own democracy. It will require all the restraint and purpose and wisdom that we struggled to muster when the enemy wasn't us."

George Packer at The Atlantic writes that 9/11 "was the first sign that the 21st century would be a period of shock and disaster."

And Calvin Woodward, Ellen Knickmeyer, and David Rising of the AP discuss the event's impact.

"A Propaganda Effort"

"Critics will quibble that these documents don't prove the actual specifics of the long-alleged 'October Surprise.' This is true. According to the Times, they don't show Reagan striking a deal with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages until after the election, but simply working behind the scenes to thwart negotiations to free them. Perhaps someone out there exists who thinks this is better."

Branko Marcetic in a 2020 Jacobin article writes about revelations about the 1980 presidential election from the papers of David Rockefeller.

"Neither Carrots nor Sticks Have Swayed China as Predicted"

"Nearly half a century since Nixon's first steps toward rapprochement, the record is increasingly clear that Washington once again put too much faith in its power to shape China's trajectory. All sides of the policy debate erred: free traders and financiers who foresaw inevitable and increasing openness in China, integrationists who argued that Beijing's ambitions would be tamed by greater interaction with the international community, and hawks who believed that China's power would be abated by perpetual American primacy."

In a 2018 Foreign Affairs article, Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner write that since World War II "Chinese realities upset American expectations."

"They Remember, Even if the Rest of the Country Does Not"

"Just as these white settlers began moving into the region, a series of events in Mexico (a recession in 1906; the Mexican Revolution in 1910) caused an increase in Mexican immigration, as people fled instability in their home country. The decadelong revolution in Mexico ended the reign of Porfirio Diaz, a dictator who had supported wealthy landowners and industrialists. The reforms called for by Mexicans who challenged Diaz's rule included land redistribution. This scared Anglo Texans, who worried that revolutionaries might look at Texas—where some Anglos had begun to accumulate huge tracts of land that once belonged to Tejano smallholders—and see fertile ground for protest and action."

In a 2016 Slate article, Rebecca Onion discusses the era of "La Matanza" in early-twentieth-century Texas.

"To Deploy Literature in the Service of Their Respective National Interests, and the Willingness of Writers to Be So Deployed"

"In this context, Mary McCarthy comes off more poorly than most of the other writers chronicled in this account. With customary cockiness, she claimed that novelists could make a special contribution to the broader effort of understanding the Vietnam War amid its conflicting imperatives and narratives: 'What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a rat.' Yet even as ­McCarthy questioned the accounts she was given by the U.S. and U.S.-supported government officials in Saigon, she credulously swallowed the self-­presentation of the North Vietnamese. In addition to suffering from poor sales of pamphlet versions of her writing about the situation in Vietnam, McCarthy was criticized by the likes of Diana Trilling, in the New York Review of Books, for committing the mortal sin of any serious and self-respecting intellectual: ordering one's capacities for genuinely liberal and open inquiry and analysis to the affirmation of static ideological purposes." 

Randy Boyagoda at First Things reviews Duncan White's Cold Warriors: The Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.

"A Long, Four-Decade Pause"

"It's not the first time politicians have latched on to economic unrest and public safety concerns to press a hard-line, anti-immigration agenda. In 1921, Congress passed, and President Warren G. Harding signed, the 'Emergency Quota Act,' sharply reducing the number of immigrants permitted to enter the country. A putative response to rising unemployment and social unrest, in reality the law represented the culmination of decades of racial and religious-motivated bigotry against newcomers from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. It also portended a long, four-decade pause in the country's openness to immigration."

Joshua Zeitz at Politico compares Donald Trump to Warren Harding.

Holidays from History in the Sun

"We all love a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an ending—preferably a happy ending but, above all, some clearly demarcated final page with a lesson. The lesson of 1989 is that there is no grand march, no dialectic of thesis versus antithesis resolving in some synthesis, no moral arc bending toward justice—or toward any particular thing. History is an unending whirlwind, and we're caught in it."

Fred Kaplan at Slate reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And Larry Elliott at The Guardian describes what was lost with the end of the Cold War.

"The Only Candidate of the Left"

"Despite these criticisms, it's evident that Sanders is the only candidate who stands aligned with the admirable, if recently mostly moribund, traditions of democratic socialist internationalism. He is the only candidate who appreciates the rapacious history of US foreign policy; he is the only candidate to envision a post-national future; and he is the only candidate to take all of humanity, and not just American citizens, as his subject. If elected, he has the potential to revolutionize how Americans understand both their own country and its relationship to the rest of the world."

Daniel Bessner at Jacobin praises Bernie Sanders's foreign policy.

"The Room Where It Happens"

"One of the most painful chapters of the book concerns a tragic incident in which a car in Power's motorcade struck and killed a young boy in Cameroon while she was on a tour to highlight the atrocities of Boko Haram. As a metaphor, the incident is almost sickeningly apt: the U.S. secure in its military might and moral righteousness, taking innocent lives as collateral damage in its wake. 'Even when we try to do right, we invariably end up making situations worse,' she reflects at a low point following the accident."

Joshua Keating at Slate reviews Samantha Power's The Education of an Idealist.

"A Knack for Summarizing Complex Ideas in a Few Pithy Words"

"'What are public intellectuals supposed to do? We're not supposed to be cheerleaders. We're supposed to be prodding those with power to think through what they're doing that will affect us all.'"

At the Portland Press Herald, Matt Schudel writes an obituary for Leslie Gelb.

"We Can and We Must Pursue a Different Option"

"Neither do we want a foreign policy that is based on the logic that led to those wars and corroded our democracy: a logic that privileges military tools over diplomatic ones, aggressive unilateralism over multilateral engagement, and acquiescence to our undemocratic partners over the pursuit of core interests alongside democratic allies who truly share our values. We have to view the terrorism threat through the proper scope, rather than allowing it to dominate our view of the world. The time has come to envision a new form of American engagement: one in which the United States leads not in war-making but in bringing people together to find shared solutions to our shared concerns. American power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but by our ability to build on our common humanity, harnessing our technology and enormous wealth to create a better life for all people."

Bernie Sanders in Foreign Affairs writes that "[t]he American people don't want endless war."