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In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

BEIJING — Two days of inconclusive U.S.-China talks ended here Friday amid signs that the Trump administration is demanding dramatic concessions that challenge core elements of China’s economic system and its ambitions for future development.

unclear where the two sides had found common ground

Chinese negotiators presented their own hard-line terms for a reshaped trade relationship, demanding the United States drop a complaint over China’s licensing terms for foreign patent holders and immediately designate China a market economy, which would give it easier treatment under routine U.S. trade enforcement actions.

In 1981 U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan was shot during an assassination attempt

In fact, a peaceful transition of power is seen as vital to a democracy.

Thus it is somewhat surprising that presidential succession in the United States has often been unclear and problematic. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention (1787) spent little time on succession

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

ritish politics in early March has been a tale of four prime ministers—two former ones, the present holder of the office, and one who would like to take over. Never in British history has there been such discordance between the past, present, and possibly future occupants of Downing Street.

Over the past few weeks, as Chinese health officials reported new “imported” coronavirus cases almost every day, foreigners living in the country have noticed a change. They have been turned away from restaurants, shops, gyms and hotels, subjected to further screening, yelled at by locals and avoided in public spaces.

Experiences range from socially awkward to xenophobic. An American walking with a group of foreigners in a park in Beijing saw a woman grab her child and run the other way. Others have described being called “foreign trash”.

A recent online article, under an image of ship stacked with refuse being pushed away from China’s coast, was headlined: “Beware of a second outbreak started by foreign garbage.

The Sanders campaign is a bet that the 2020 race can be won by mobilizing the Americans least committed to the political process while alienating and even offending the Americans most committed to it. It’s a hell of a gamble, and for what? To elect to the presidency a person with a proven record of accomplishing little for the causes he espouses, despite almost 32 years in the House and Senate?

The latest CNN poll showed Sanders erasing Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters—perhaps in spite of Sanders’s indifference to identity politics, or maybe, just maybe, because of that indifference.

But the constellation of issues that predominates among highly online and very well-informed anti-Trump voters matters a lot less to millions of other people who could potentially decide the 2020 election

Outside of wars or pandemics, death rates for large populations across the world have been consistently falling for decades

Yet working-age white men and women without college degrees were dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease at such rates that, for three consecutive years, life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole had fallen. “The only precedent is a century ago, from 1915 through 1918, during the First World War and the influenza epidemic that followed it,”

Between 1999 and 2017, more than six hundred thousand extra deaths—deaths in excess of the demographically predicted number—occurred just among people aged forty-five to fifty-four.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.