In November 1982, Richard Pipes, on loan from Harvard University to President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, was putting the finishing touches on what would become National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD-75), the strategic blueprint for winning the Cold…

As the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis approaches, we can expect the usual media plaudits for President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and the so-called members of ExComm — the executive committee of the National Security…

Washington — Whatever happened to the Russian Army? For that matter, whatever happened to the Russian Air Force or the Russian Navy, whose flagship is now at the bottom of the Black Sea? The answer is nothing. Nothing has happened…

One hundred years ago this month, just four years after the end of World War I, the magazine Foreign Affairs made its debut. It is the journal of the American foreign policy establishment, published by the Council on Foreign Relations….

When I heard about the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, I sighed. He was one of the final remaining pivotal figures in the end of the Cold War: Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Václav Havel, Boris Yeltsin,…

The National Interest just published an essay by Pakistani Sen. Mushahid Hussain urging U.S. policymakers to accommodate China’s achievement of Indo-Pacific hegemony. The senator, who studied at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and chairs the Pakistani Senate’s Defence Committee, doesn’t…

I’ve known Ukrainians my entire life. My parents’ circle of post–World War II émigré friends included a few mixed marriages. In one case the two children of one such lively marriage saw the daughter follow her father and identify as…

This July, Henry Kissinger’s new book Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy will be released. The book analyzes the statesmanship of Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, France’s Charles de Gaulle, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, and America’s…

As Vladimir Putin forges ahead with his invasion of Ukraine, killing all manner of Ukrainian civilians in a horrific display of mass murder, the saga of Gavrilo Princip is recalled. Who was Gavrilo Princip? He was a Bosnian Serb teenager…

“He is the most interesting man in the world.” So declared the classic Dos Equis commercials, amusingly showing its carefree guy diving off cliffs, confronting bears, arm-wrestling Latin American tinhorn dictators, charming the ladies (always more than one at once),…