In a lengthy and important essay in Foreign Affairs about “detente” with the Soviet Union, historian Niall Ferguson, who is completing the second-volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger, mentions Richard Nixon just once. And the photographs accompanying the article…
When I was a boy riding the bus to our diocesan high school, an older kid sometimes sat in the seat next to me. He was an intelligent fellow who has since become a lawyer of considerable reputation. We might…
What do foreign policy realists hope for? Not global democracy. Not the emergence of greater global governance. Not a unipolar world led by the United States or China. Not an end to all international conflict. Realists understand that some of…
Some conservatives, most prominently Vivek Ramaswamy, think the United States can flip Russia from foe to friend and end the Ukraine war. Ramaswamy has promised he would break up the Russia-China alliance — a nifty reversal of Nixon-to-China. It will…
The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad By Harrison Salisbury ( Da Capo Press, 672 pages, $23) Eighty-two years ago, the Russian city of St. Petersburg — then called Leningrad after the founder of the Soviet Union — was under siege…
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the growing antisemitism on America’s campuses is just how long those in the best position to do something about it — alumni, major donors, the legislative overseers of state schools, students’ parents, and less…
Le Temps Des Combats (The Time of Battles) By Nicolas Sarkozy (Fayard, 592 pages, $43) Like clockwork, every time former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) publishes a new book, his past legal problems resurface. In 2021, I reviewed his delightful…
Sixty years ago today, the president of the United States was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. No one experienced the tragedy like John F. Kennedy’s wife. The image of Jackie Kennedy almost instinctively, in a motherly way, scrambling to the…
Over the years I’ve had many hard things to say about the ambience of wealth and ambition at Princeton University, my alma mater, and about the school’s abandonment of its once coherent curriculum in favor of vague “area requirements.” One…
