Few events in modern diplomatic history have astounded the world as much as Nixon’s visit to China. Only Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s official visit to Israel in November 1977, which ended the diplomatic boycott of Israel that existed since its foundation in 1948, can be compared to it. Read More Here
Is Donald Trump reviving the “madman theory” of diplomacy, introduced by Richard Nixon to instill fear in America’s adversaries? North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s description of Trump as “mentally deranged” suggests that such a ploy might be working – or else Kim is more right than he, or the rest of us, would like. Read […]
Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasized the value of being “unpredictable,” and has established a pattern of firing off ill-conceived threats that do make him appear slightly unhinged. His apparent hope is that this sort of behavior will persuade both allies and adversaries will do his bidding, for fear that this irrational and impulsive man will […]
What does it take to bring down a president and change the world? Sometimes years of collective action, planning and organizing; sometimes it’s as simple as one man doing nothing one night in a local bar. Read Here – Ozy
Make no mistake: American foreign policy has indeed failed. It failed to prevent the rise of a peer competitor such as China, failed to entrench democracy in Arab and Latin American transition societies, and failed to integrate regional powers such as Russia and Iran into a liberal order. Barack Obama came into office seeking to […]
On the surface, the similarities between 1960s Iran and modern Saudi Arabia seem self-explanatory. Like Saudi Arabia today, Iran in the Pahlavi era was ruled by a monarchy with a close (but complicated) relationship with the United States. Indeed, Tehran and Riyadh would go on to become the “twin pillars” of Nixon’s strategy for keeping the […]
Downshifting is always painful, but politicians often make it more painful—and ultimately more destabilising—than it needs to be. That was certainly the case in the U.S. in the 1970s, and Chinese leaders would do well to learn from America’s experience. Read Here – The Atlantic
Forty-three years after Richard Nixon made his famous visit to China, that country has seemingly decided to take a page from the former U.S. president’s Treasury Department. As China lowers the value of the yuan, the country’s economic policy makers are mimicking the blasé attitude of Nixon-era Treasury chief John Connally, who dismissed international complaints […]
U.S. foreign policy has reached a turning point, as analysts from across the political spectrum have started to dust off Cold War-era arguments and to speak of the need for a policy of containment against China. The once solid Washington consensus behind the benefits of “constructive engagement” with Beijing has fallen apart. Read Here – […]
Though (Henry) Kissinger has come under attack from liberal circles—among the more notable assaults are Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power, Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger and, most recently, Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram—he has also regularly incurred the ire of conservatives. Throughout the 1970s, he was steadily denounced as deaf to […]
looking beyond borders 