Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Which brings to the fore the largest problem: the Trump administration’s national-security team.

There is no such thing as a Platonic ideal of strategy. There is, rather, only strategy as can be executed by a particular group of people at any time.

Any war—and if you are in the business of blowing people up, you are at war—involves improvisation and reaction. As Winston Churchill somberly observed, “Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”

Sixteen-year-old Helmuth Hübener couldn’t believe his ears. As he crouched in a closet in Hamburg, secretly listening to his brother’s forbidden short-wave radio, the voice of the BBC announcer painted a picture of Nazi Germany that was dramatically different from the one he had been told to believe.

Germans like Hübener, they spoke of impending victory and praised the greatness of their country. But the Germany the BBC described—and the progress of the war its reporters tracked—sounded like it was on the brink of disaster

übener’s short life was shaped by the rise of fascism in Germany. The Nazis changed nearly every facet of everyday life for Germans, and the boy was no exception. A devoted Boy Scout, he was forced to become part of the Hitler Youth, the youth arm of the Nazi Party, when the Nazis banned the organization in 1935.

I was there to answer a question: “Can I endure the most difficult thing a man can face?” I was there for the war experience. Though it may seem noble to fight for one’s country and family, those weren’t my reasons for going to Iraq. So no one is in my debt, no one owes me anything.

But we do owe it to ourselves to understand the wars we have waged and those who have fought them.

During the past decade of war, less than 1 percent of the American population served in the military at any given time, compared with more than 12 percent during World War II.

In Moscow, especially in the not-so-good old days, the question almost always asked is kto vinovat: “Who is to blame?” The American capital now finds itself engaged in that very Russian exercise ever since President Vladimir V. Putin’s troops entered Ukraine.

As president, Mr. Obama naturally has absorbed most of the criticism, accused of being too soft not only in his dealings with Mr. Putin of Russia, but also with Syria, Iran and other rogue players on the world stage. The coincidental timing of his proposal to slash the Army to pre-World War II size only gave additional ammunition to the hawks. And some made sure to put former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the cross hairs as well, recognizing her possible presidential campaign in 2016.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor, “The president has eroded American credibility in the world.”

MOSCOW — The Kremlin plans to sit out the centenary of the Russian Revolution.

There will be no national holiday on Sunday, March 12, the date generally recognized as the start of the uprising. Nor will there even be a government-issued official interpretation, like the one mandating that World War II was a “Great Victory.”

In comparison, the Kremlin has turned World War II into the apogee of national unity.

opportunity to reconsider some of the myths surrounding the historic decision to use the atomic bomb

loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military

Japan had been willing to sacrifice city after city to American conventional bombing in the months leading up to Hiroshima

'We are all Jews': World War II soldier honored for saving lives in POW camp

He took that secret to his grave when he died in 1985, two weeks shy of his 66th birthday: the story about the day he challenged the commander of the POW camp and saved all the Jews under his command.

On the prisoners' first day at the POW camp, the German intercom system in the American barracks crackled to life. Only the Jewish POWs were to fall out after morning roll call.

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary and head of the Bolshevik Party who rose to prominence during the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The bloody upheaval marked the end of the oppressive Romanov dynasty and centuries of imperial rule in Russia. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party, making Lenin leader of the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist state.  

Later that year, 17-year-old Lenin—still known as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov—was expelled from Kazan Imperial University, where he was studying law, for taking part in an illegal student protest. After his expulsion, Lenin immersed himself in radical political literature, including the writings of German philosopher and socialist Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital.

Lenin later moved to Germany and then Switzerland, where he met other European Marxists. During this time, he adopted the pseudonym Lenin and established the Bolshevik Party.

Eighty years ago, as Americans came together to defeat the fascism that threatened civilization, American factories poured out the weapons needed to crush Germany and the other Axis Powers.

Today America can do it again and create the arsenal that defeats this latest threat to civilization: the coronavirus. From ventilators and N95 masks, to anti-viral drugs and ICU equipment and hospital beds, American companies are being mobilized in the face of the most serious public health crisis in more than a century. But these companies will only be successful if we learn the right lessons from the industrial mobilization that won the world's biggest war.

Have a clear objective and a realistic timeline When war mobilization began in 1940-41, no one said the goal was to defeat fascism — and no one was able to mass produce tanks or bombers from a standing start. From the beginning, Washington set a more purposeful goal of building a modern, well-equipped military in case war came.

Cheney and Rumsfeld may have provided the ideology that drove the United States to invade Iraq. But Bush provided the temperament. And that mattered even more.  

Bush 41 accuses Rumsfeld of “a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names.” But those same qualities describe Bush 43.

the common thread between Bush’s behavior before and after taking office was his penchant for high-risk moves based on his own instincts, irrespective of what anybody else thought

The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea, not counting the 32,557 tons of napalm, Bruce Cumings, a University of Chicago professor who’s written several books on North Korea, wrote in “The Korean War: A History.” This compared with 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific theater in World War II.

“If we keep on tearing the place apart, we can make it a most unpopular affair for the North Koreans,” Defense Secretary Robert Lovett said after the napalm and aerial bombing campaigns of 1950 and 1951, according to Cumings. “We ought to go right ahead,” Lovett said.

Air Force commanders complained that they’d run out of targets.

In 2011, when it was announced that Mr. Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas, we held huge antiwar rallies. And in 2021 we took to the streets once more throughout the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after his return to Moscow.

I want to believe we did everything in our power to rein in Mr. Putin. But it’s not true. Though we protested, organized, lobbied, spread information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: We failed. We failed to prevent a catastrophe and we failed to change the country for the better. And now we must bear that failure.

Those who stayed have lost much of what remained of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.

Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, could send the world economy spiraling into another 2008-like crisis

He called for central banks to act aggressively and immediately to reduce the risk of climate-related catastrophe

the U.S. Federal Reserve was the pivotal American institution in stopping a second Great Depression. Its actions were “historically unprecedented, spectacular in scale,” he writes, and widely understood by experts to be the “decisive innovation of the crisis.”

the most sustained line of response has been from my friend Eric Schnurer, a writer and long-time advisor to state and local governments.

In his first installment, in the fall of 2019, Schnurer emphasized the parts of the America-and-Rome comparison he thought were most significant—and worrisome. Then last summer, during the election campaign and the pandemic lockdown, he extended the comparison in an even-less-cheering way. In a third and more cautionary extension of his argument this summer, he concentrated on the U.S. Senate.

Now, chapter four:

The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in world history.

The chief leader, known as the Sultan, was given absolute religious and political authority over his people.

Osman I, a leader of the Turkish tribes in Anatolia, founded the Ottoman Empire around 1299. The term “Ottoman” is derived from Osman’s name, which was “Uthman” in Arabic.

The U.S. Army field manual defines "the rule of law" as follows: "The rule of law refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency."

it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms," they declared. "From the perspective of many around the world, the U.S. appears to claim, in effect, the legal right to kill any person it determines is a member of al-Qaida or its associated forces, in any state on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret evidence, evaluated in a secret process by unknown and largely anonymous individuals—with no public disclosure of which organizations are considered 'associated forces,' no means for anyone outside that secret process to raise questions about the criteria or validity of the evidence, and no means for anyone outside that process to identify or remedy mistakes or abuses."

Unfortunately, the U.S. government violates "rule of law" norms in other areas too. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not operate with "procedural and legal transparency." The Office of Legal Counsel adopts highly contestable yet totally secret interpretations of statutes that dramatically affect policy outcomes. Citizens and corporations are served with secret court orders and often feel confused about whether they are even permitted to consult with counsel. Laws against revealing classified information are not enforced equally—powerful actors routinely leak official secrets with impunity, while whistleblowers and dissidents are aggressively persecuted for the mere "mishandling" of state secrets. The director of national intelligence committed perjury without consequence. President Obama has blatantly violated a duly ratified, legally binding treaty that requires him to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. He also violated the War Powers Resolution by participating in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi without securing the approval of Congress. And he won't even clarify exactly what groups he considers us to be at war with! That is only a partial list.

This paper addresses these assumptions about Japanese women as “behind” and suggests that their lives have been far more varied throughout history and in the present than the stereotypes suggest.

Rather than assuming that the west is somehow ahead of the rest of the world, I use what historians call the concept of “coevalness” throughout. By “coeval,” I mean that the situation of women around the world unfolded in relatively similar ways at roughly the same time.

I submit that it would be a mistake to blame Japanese women’s supposedly low status on “tradition” or “culture.” This assertion prevents us from seeing the diversity in the historical record and the ways patriarchy—that is, male dominance—was remade and even strengthened in the modern period.

To some, it all sounds like noise. “Whether Covid came accidentally from a lab in Wuhan or a seafood market is almost beside the point,” Edward Luce wrote in The Financial Times last month,

This has always struck me as an exceedingly strange perspective. Perhaps it is a truism to say that the events that brought about the deaths of perhaps 20 million people around the world and the jagged disruption of many billions of other lives are of enormous consequence and that dismissing the matter of its cause as simply a “blame game” is a form of not just historical but moral incuriosity.

It is consequential as long as it remains unresolved, as well. That’s because our collective uncertainty about the origin of the pandemic has itself shaped the way we’ve come to think about what we’ve all just lived through, the way we responded in the first place and the way the pandemic has played out, often weaponized, in geopolitics.