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The American Century, contends the historian Adam Tooze, began in 1916

In “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931,” Mr. Tooze identifies those struggles as the crucial moment when the Allies ran out of funds. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Federal Reserve to block additional loans by J.P. Morgan & Co. that would have kept the Allies going, because nothing, in his view, justified further slaughter.

Perceiving minimal differences in the two sides’ war aims, Wilson first offered mediation and then called for “peace without victory.”

but after surviving a beheading attempt and witnessing true moments of horror, he began to feel complicit in the violence around him.

The Australian journalist is the only war correspondent to survive being kidnapped by al-Qaeda in Iraq, and became obsessed with its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He has opened up about his experiences in the film Only The Dead, which is showing at the Sydney Film Festival.

He now believes it was the first-ever attack by what the world now knows as the Islamic State.

South Korea’s president proposed Monday that the two Koreas improve their tense relations by resuming the reunions of families separated since the Korean War, a humanitarian program that seemed close to being renewed last year but was scuttled as negotiations soured.

President Park Geun-hye’s overture came five days after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, urged that Seoul and Pyongyang create “a favorable climate for improved relations” in a New Year’s Day speech.

Ms. Park, a conservative, made two other conciliatory gestures toward the North, offering to increase humanitarian aid to the impoverished country and to let South Korean civic groups provide assistance to its farmers and ranchers. But she expressed skepticism about the prospect of meeting with Mr. Kim, whose government has until recently exhorted South Koreans to overthrow her “fascist dictatorship.”

At 25, Lundberg was no stranger to America First, protective tariffs and nationalism. No American of his age or older could be. These themes had been among the most prominent topics for public debate throughout his short life. And each had contributed, in one way or another, to the chain of events that took Lundberg to war. The isolationism that fueled the original America First movement died with the first bomb at Pearl Harbor.

The danger and folly of these policies were written in an ocean of blood — Lundberg’s and all the others’. So when the wasteful war finally ended, the United States led the world away from those policies and built institutions to prevent new eruptions.

No sniveling Eastern elitist erected this framework. It was a bipartisan project guided by a Missouri farm boy, Harry S. Truman. A chastened former isolationist, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, delivered Republican support to the Democratic president. “Politics,” the senator declared refreshingly, “stops at the water’s edge.”

Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire

In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain

In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain

In June 1488, just three years after Henry VII’s unlikely victory in the English Midlands, James IV became king on the battlefield of Sauchieburn south of Stirling, close to the spot where Robert Bruce had won his great victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.

James IV was brought up at Stirling Castle by his mother, Margaret of Denmark, alongside his two younger brothers. The queen had produced three healthy sons but she and James III led separate lives after an earlier rebellion in 1482. The king, who had managed to alienate all of his siblings, believed that his wife had sided with his brother, the Duke of Albany, when the duke returned from exile in France and invaded Scotland with the future Richard III of England. James III seems also to have felt that his eldest son was tainted by contact with Albany and perhaps considered barring the boy from the succession

James IV was ruler of a land famously described in a letter written by its own nobility in 1320 to Pope John XXII as ‘the tiny country of Scotia lying on the very edge of the inhabited world’. Scotland was poor, cold and wet. Edinburgh, its capital, held only 12,000 citizens, in contrast to London’s 50,000. Yet, like its new monarch, the country was not inward-looking.  Difficulty of travel by road over rugged terrain meant that it had long relied on sea routes for transport and communication with the wider world. The kings of Scotland were determined not to be overlooked in Europe. They forged trade and political alliances with Scandinavia and were long-standing allies of the French, who viewed Scotland as a brake on the ambitions of England. The two countries that occupied the island of Britain were natural enemies, nowhere more so than in the Borders, where centuries-old feuds and the violence that fuelled them were adjudicated by special courts composed of English and Scots. But James III had attempted a policy of conciliation with England that was unpopular with his aristocracy and Henry VII, a cautious man, did not relish constant war with his northern neighbour. It remained to be seen how James IV would approach Anglo-Scottish relations and how he would develop his ambition to make Scotland a European power.

The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age — the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism — and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world.

the calamitous 14th century is not as far removed from our own experience as we would like to think.

Since the Second World War, we have experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth, and so it was for Medieval Europe on the eve of the Black Death

the first significant human use of fossil fuels—coal— arose during the Song dynasty (960–1279) in China [36,37]. Drawn from mines in the north, the Chinese coal industry, developed primarily to support its iron industry, grew in size through the eleventh century to become equal to the production of the entire European (excluding Russia) coal industry in 1700.

the European coal industry, primarily in England, was beginning its ascent in the thirteenth century. The use of coal grew as did the size of London, and became the fuel of choice in the city because of its high energy density.

energy constraints provided a strong bottleneck for the growth of human numbers and activity. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels shattered that bottleneck. Fossil fuels represented a vast energy store of solar energy from the past that had accumulated from tens or hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. They were the perfect fuel source—energy-rich, dense, easily transportable and relatively straightforward to access. Human energy use rose sharply. In general, those industrial societies used four or five times as much energy as their agrarian predecessors, who in turn used three or four times as much as our hunting and gathering forebears [52].

This is a poisonous cocktail of legitimate grievances and exaggeration, all laced with a lingering resentment of colonialism. The pity is that emerging countries are making a grave error. As sovereign powers, they too have a stake in the war. All the West’s faults do not outweigh the fact that, in the system Mr Putin is offering, their people would suffer terribly.

The reason is that the world Mr Putin desires would be far more decadent, self-serving and amoral than the one that exists today.

Ukraine shows how. His extravagant lies about Nazis in Kyiv and his denial that Russia is even fighting a war are decadent. His brazen claim that NATO provoked the war, posing an intolerable threat to Russia by expanding into central and eastern Europe is self-serving. Those countries were not swallowed up: they chose to join NATO for their own protection after decades of Soviet tyranny. And witness the drowning of all morality in his armies’ unconscionable use of torture, rape and mass murder as the routine tools of war.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, many German politicians have publicly admitted they got Vladimir Putin wrong. Even German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has apologised, saying it was a mistake to use trade and energy to build bridges with Moscow.

"It's a bitter acknowledgement that for 30 years we emphasised dialogue and co-operation with Russia," says Nils Schmid, foreign affairs spokesperson for Mr Steinmeier's party, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). "Now we have to recognise this has not worked. That's why we have entered a new era for European security."

That new era was dubbed "Zeitenwende" - literally meaning a turning point - by Germany's SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a now-famous speech in the German parliament a few days after the invasion.

Migration could be “a dissolving force for the European Union” due to deep cultural differences between European countries and their long-term inability to reach a common policy, the EU’s most senior diplomat has said.

Borrell said nationalism was on the rise in Europe but this was more about migration than Euroscepticism. “Brexit actually was feared to be an epidemic. And it has not been,” he said. “It has been a vaccine. No one wants to follow the British leaving the European Union.

He attributed this to deep cultural and political differences inside the EU: “There are some members of the European Union that are Japanese-style – we don’t want to mix. We don’t want migrants. We don’t want to accept people from outside. We want our purity.”

When the hard right, the left and an autocrat (who denies Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians) combine forces, you know there is something wrong. Let’s be clear: German politicians do not need to wrestle free of history to navigate the debate on the Gaza war. It is a myth that Germany is uncritical in its support of the Israeli government.

Germans had been told they were “surrounded by friends”, as Helmut Kohl put it. They woke up ill-equipped to face a world of sworn enemies. Russia pulverised decades of German Ostpolitik when it attacked Ukraine, and with it the European postwar order.

There was never any love lost between either the Merkel or Scholz governments and Benjamin Netanyahu. Angela Merkel knew he was working with Donald Trump to kill off the nuclear deal with Iran behind her back. And that he was lying about his acceptance of two states. Nobody involved with the Middle East dossier in Berlin trusts Netanyahu

Governing during this era will require extraordinary levels of experienced statesmanship — running industrial programs that don’t become bloated, partially deglobalizing the economy without setting off trade wars, steadily outcompeting China without humiliating it. If China realizes it is falling further behind every year, then an invasion of Taiwan may be more imminent.

Miller was asked what were the odds that over the next five years a dangerous military clash between the United States and China would produce an economic crisis equivalent to the Great Depression. He put the odds at 20 percent.

ara Menker runs a private company, Gro Intelligence, that uses data and AI to make predictions about climate change and food security, but when she appeared before the U.N. Security Council on May 19, she sounded more like an advocate. Gro’s data has found that, because of rising food prices around the world, 400 million people have become food insecure in the last 5 months alone. (Food insecurity, as Gro defines it, means people living on $3.59 a day or less.)

Menker, 39, who was chosen as one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2021, was born in Ethiopia, attended college at Mount Holyoke, worked as a commodities trader on Wall Street, and left to start Gro to use technology to tackle challenges like hunger and climate change. Today, Gro works with governments and big food companies, analyzing hundreds of trillions of data points from satellites, governments, and private sources, to forecast the supply of agricultural products globally.

In recent months, as the war in Ukraine raged on, Gro’s systems started flagging problems that were putting a growing number of people at risk of going hungry. Some were worsened by the war, but many others have been building for longer, caused by the actions of other governments banning exports or imposing tariffs. Menker talked to TIME shortly after briefing the U.N.

It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.

he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.

The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.

American progressives have a story to tell, and they are not afraid to tell it. In this story global capitalism is a war zone. Free trade is a racket. Big business and big pharma are rapacious villains that crush the common man

In this context you need a government prepared for war. You need a government fired by economic nationalism, willing to play trade hardball against our foes. You need a centralized industrial policy to shift investment where it’s needed. You need a government that will protect you, control you and give you thing

As in any war, you want government that is centralized and paternalistic.

Napoleon had a grand vision for himself and his country. He wanted to be a new Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Only the most ambitious of endeavors could have the impact his heroes had achieved.It was this that led him to a succession of wars that spanned a continent. It led him to attain much, but also to go too far. No time was left to consolidate what had already been taken. Wars were launched on multiple fronts, most famously the invasion of Russia while his troops were fighting the British in the Iberian Peninsula. The Emperor bit off more than he could chew.

Throughout his Italian campaigns, he picked off Austrian armies piece by piece, using flanking movements to overcome defensive positions.As he grew older, his mental agility faded. On several occasions, he resorted to trying to win by throwing thousands of men straight at the enemy. It led to great losses in his armies and less dramatic successes in battle.

Napoleon expected a great deal of the people around him, both in their willingness to follow his agenda and their ability to achieve it. These unrealistic expectations saw parts of his schemes for Europe fall apart.

Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, stunned lawmakers and foreign governments at his Jan. 11 Senate confirmation hearing when he said that the United States would be ready to block China’s access to artificial islands it is building in the South China Sea. Seemingly just a gaffe, the White House later appeared to double down on Tillerson’s stance, which taken at face value would be tantamount to an act of war.

The comments suggest President Donald Trump’s White House is eager to take an aggressive tone with Beijing, but lacks a coherent strategy to deal with China or a basic grasp of the legal and security issues at stake in the South China Sea, said former officials, diplomats, Asia experts and congressional aides.

Tillerson’s threat that America would bar China’s access to disputed reefs and islands in the South China Sea would mark a radical break with long established U.S. policies dating back to the 1990s

Even if most of the tariffs go away, Trump’s trade belligerence has done lasting damage to America’s reputation, and hence to a global economy that depends on American leadership.

The whole world now knows two things about us. First, we’re not reliable — an agreement with the U.S. is really just a suggestion, because you never know when the president will invent some excuse for breaking it.

Second, we’re easily rolled: The president may talk tough on trade, but in classic bully fashion, he runs away if confronted.

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Citing Chinese researchers, Zhong said the U.S. has been overstating its trade deficit with China by about 20 percent every year. He gave no details on how this figure was reached, but the U.S. and Chinese governments generally report widely differing trade figures because Beijing counts only the first port to which goods go instead of their final destination.

"We have noticed that some foreign-funded businesses have complained about China's investment environment," Zhong said. "The fact that they have complaints indicates that they are still paying attention to China's development and have confidence in China's market."