Departments

;

Cold War

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    1/18/2022

    Only Fools Replay Doomsday

    by William Astore

    The author worked at NORAD's headquarters under Cheyenne Mountain at the height of the Cold War and wonders why, having emerged the nominal victors of one round of military escalation toward armageddon, American policymakers seem willing to enter another. 

  • SOURCE: Defector
    1/11/2022

    How the Cold War Killed Cannabis as We Knew It

    When Henry Kissinger sought to assert American control of Caribbean bauxite ore reserves, he set off a political dirty war that poisoned the Jamaican interior and destroyed prominent strains of cannabis in the name of marijuana interdiction. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    12/1/2021

    Has the Myth of the "Good War" Done America Harm?

    Remembrance of the second world war obscures the ambivalence many Americans felt about the conflict and the frequent divergence of military strategy and propaganda from the noble ideals of freedom and democracy. Elizabeth Samet's book asks if the myth of the good war has encouraged war since.

  • SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
    11/29/2021

    Can Cold War History Help Stop a Disastrous US-China Conflict?

    by Li Chen and Odd Arne Westad

    The emerging superpower rivalry between the US and China is not exactly like the Cold War, and simplistic historical analogies are a poor strategic guide. But Cold War history does offer examples of potential pitfalls. 

  • 11/7/2021

    Remember the Army's Role in the Pacific War: Important Then, Influential Afterward

    by John C. McManus

    During the second World War and after, the Marine Corps has received admiration and attention for its role in the Pacific, but the Army carried out a huge number of invasions and performed the logistics other services depended on. The Army's experiences in WWII also were foundational, for good and ill, for the next half-century of American war. 

  • SOURCE: Not Even Past
    10/19/2021

    In Memoriam: Robert Divine, 1929-2021

    by H.W. Brands and Mark Atwood Lawrence

    Two University of Texas colleagues pay tribute to the scholarly, teaching, and personal contributions of the late Robert Divine to the field of diplimatic history. 

  • 10/10/2021

    Imagine a World Remade by US-China Cooperation

    by Lawrence Wittner

    The world has everything to gain from remaking the US-China relationship around cooperative approaches to global problems. Will Xi and Biden follow the example of Reagan and Gorbachev? 

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    9/15/2021

    On the Eve of Destruction: Breaking the Double-Bind of the Nuclear Arms Race

    by Richard Rhodes

    Politicians and defense contractors who wanted American nuclear supremacy won out over scientists seeking international effort to contain the extinction-level threat posed by thermonuclear weapons, even to the point of denying the planet-destroying power of the H-bomb. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    8/16/2021

    Review: How Espionage Has Helped Win Wars

    A roundup of new books in the history of espionage covers Asian Americans in the WWII OSS, the early Cold War, and an examination of the roots of Putin's aggressiveness against dissidents.

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    8/19/2021

    How Empires Fall

    by Matt Wehmeier

    "Decisive political moments are rarely expected, and even more rarely planned. Governments change all the time. But every once in a while, empires fall."

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    8/4/2021

    5 Ways Americans Misunderstand Cuba

    by Caroline McCulloch

    Both the Cuban government's censorship and many Americans' nationalistic perspective hinder an accurate understanding of even the basic history and politics of the Cuban-American relationship. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    7/26/2021

    Like JFK, Biden Has Good Reason to Be Wary of the Military

    Joe Biden faces challenges like those that confronted JFK: both presidents faced a substantial presence of right-wing extremists within the active and retired ranks of military leadership. Biden must stand firm in the face of manufactured controversies including over diversity training. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    6/29/2021

    Blackness and the Bomb

    by Erica X. Eisen

    "Throughout the atomic age, civil defense authorities demanded the active participation of Black citizens whom their measures failed to protect."

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    6/15/2021

    The Freeing of the American Mind

    Louis Menand joins Ezra Klein's podcast to discuss his new book and the intellectual history of the cold war era. 

  • 6/13/2021

    It's Time for a "Don't Trust, Do Verify" US-Russia Cybersecurity Treaty

    by Glenn C. Altschuler and Justin Lifflander

    The Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings that yielded the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and established mutual weapons monitoring weren't expected to succeed, but offer hope that negotiations between Biden and Putin could advance progress toward needed mutual cybersecurity action. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    6/8/2021

    The U.S. War On Drugs Helped Unleash The Violence In Colombia Today

    by Kyle Longley

    Counternarcotics operations have been a pretext for funding a buildup of the Colombian security forces, allowing a US-friendly rightist government to avoid dealing with the economic and social causes of unrest.