Perhaps the biggest challenge to dictatorship, and its greatest weakness, is the danger and uncertainty associated with leadership transition. No one — including the incumbent ruler — knows the real rules of transition, such as how a candidate is chosen…
I have always despised the latest trends. It took me years to buy my first cell phone. Well into the 21st century, I finally started to watch the television series that everyone followed passionately in the ’90s. And now I’ve…
Sometime between 770 B.C.E. and 221 B.C.E., Sun Tzu (or a group of Chinese writers — historians and scholars are still not sure) wrote The Art of War, a book still in print today and still studied by military officers…
The pandemic has been wreaking havoc in China, not due to the virus but due to the Chinese government’s policies. Shanghai has been locked down since March 28, and people are scrambling for food and other vital supplies on a…
On July 6, 1914, German Foreign Minister Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg sent a telegram to Germany’s Ambassador to Austria-Hungary instructing him to inform Emperor Francis Joseph that while Kaiser Wilhelm II “cannot interfere in the dispute now going on between…
In 1946, diplomat and scholar George Kennan wrote a document that woke up the American government to the need to resist Russian post-war expansion. For more than three years, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been the vital ally of America…
“‘Don’t Worry, Xi, It Only Hurts When I Laugh,’” editorial cartoon by Shaomin Li for The American Spectator, March 29, 2022.
The defeat of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in World War II ushered in the Cold War era. For the four and a half decades between the defeat of fascism and the collapse of communism, global affairs unfolded…
