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You write that Hitler's war aims were impossible—how so? The Germans were trying to win a straightforward conventional war and, at the same time, trying to fight an ideological war: a specifically Nazi war as opposed to a German war. I believe that a true German nationalist—Otto von Bismarck, say, or Helmuth von Moltke—could have won the Second World War, because he wouldn't have made the kind of demands of the German military that Hitler did, which was to win a two-front conventional war while at the same time imposing the policies of the "Aryan master race." Those aims were directly in opposition.

Could the Nazis have won, had they done something differently? Absolutely. If they had not invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and if they had instead thrown at the Allies even a fraction of the 3 million men they eventually unleashed against Russia, they would have chased us out of the Middle East and cut off access to 80 percent of the Allies' oil. We simply would not have been able to continue the struggle.

Was Hitler solely responsible for Germany's military blunders? No, there were plenty of people to blame. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring is a perfect example: He promised Hitler that no Allied bombs would fall on Germany; he promised to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk solely through airpower; he promised to completely supply the German forces at Stalingrad by air. Yet he could not deliver on any of these promises.

Saudi Arabia, which itself is a close ally of Washington, has not only undermined Western efforts to press for compromise, but has also revealed diminished United States influence across the Arab world.

The Saudis, though, are not alone in this. Two other United States allies, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, have also supported the Egyptian military and sought to push back against Western entreaties

There is a strong rivalry between Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies of the Egyptian military, on the one hand, and Qatar and Turkey, on the other, both of which are big supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Turkey, the president is technically second to the prime minister. But in practice, when Mr. Erdogan was elected president in August, he absorbed the power and privilege of the prime minister’s post into his new position. And like Mr. Putin, who also shifted between the presidency and prime minister’s office, the stronger Mr. Erdogan has grown, the tenser relations have become with the United States.

he has used his conflict with Washington and his political enemies as a force to help consolidate power, as he continues to carry out the duties associated with the prime minister. He has rallied his conservative base behind his religiously infused agenda, clashing with United States policy for confronting Islamic State militants, while also blaming foreign interference for the growing catalog of crises he faces. As Turkey’s challenges have magnified — fighting on its border with Syria, strained relations with its NATO allies, pressure on the economy — Mr. Erdogan’s authority has grown only stronger.

Turkey’s continued refusal to allow the United States to use its bases for airstrikes against the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq — and insistence that the coalition target the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — has laid bare deep divisions between the two countries that have prompted analysts to question Turkey’s reliability as an ally, and some have even suggested that Turkey be expelled from NATO.

Front National support is changing France's political landscape

The far-right Front National (FN) won the first round of France’s regional elections on Sunday, taking 28% of the vote and topping the polls in six of the country’s 13 mainland regions.

As well as its size, Sunday’s result is striking because it signals a breakthrough in how the FN vote is spread across the country.

Mr. Trump, he said, wanted to end these military campaigns so he could focus on the economic and geopolitical contest with China, which he views as America’s biggest foreign threat. “This is not about a return to isolationism,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s the pivot away from the humanitarian expeditionary mentality of the internationalists.”

While Mr. Trump’s critics would shrink from that language, military analysts, former officials and diplomats acknowledge there is a case for withdrawing from both conflicts.Open-ended but limited troop deployments are not likely to alter the battlefield in either Afghanistan, where the Taliban now holds more ground than at any other time since 2001, or in Syria, where the Islamic State’s territorial grip has been broken and President Bashar al-Assad, with the help of Russia and Iran, has largely stymied the rebellion.

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Unfair? A world that revolves around American military, economic and cultural power, and uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency?

What Trump fails to understand is that the disparity in spending, with the U.S. paying more than its allies, is not a bug of the system. It is a feature. This is how the great postwar statesmen designed it, and this immensely foresighted strategy has ensured the absence of great power conflict—and nuclear war—for three-quarters of a century.

Dean Acheson, George Marshall and the other great statesmen of their generation pursued this strategy because they had learned, at unimaginable cost, that the eternal American fantasy of forever being free of Europe—isolationism, or America Firstism, in other words—was just that: a fantasy.

While it is certainly too much to say the Yanks won the Great War by themselves, it is indisputable that the Allies would not—could not—have won the war without the United States. Although America was not, at that time, widely regarded as a world power, the nation made three indispensable contributions to the Allies’ victory over the Central Powers in World War I.

Most Americans favored neutrality, and President Woodrow Wilson obliged them. He even adopted a rather muscular definition of neutrality, which he articulated to Congress on August 19, 1914:

By the onset of the great depression, Americans no longer cared to talk or think about the great war; even veterans felt that way.

How Trump’s Tariffs May Pose a Threat to Allies and Economic Growth

President Trump kicked off March by stunning members of his own White House, and leaders across the world, with a vow to impose across-the-board tariffs on steel and aluminum.

Tread lightly, the world warns

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

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's demand that new tariffs be slapped on steel and aluminum imports has spooked markets, prompted his chief economist's resignation, rattled major US allies and widened a rift with establishment Republicans.

"A strong steel and aluminum industry are vital to our national security -- absolutely vital. Steel is steel, you don't have steel you don't have a country," Trump said Thursday, adding that foreign imports and dumping have led to "shuttered plants and mills" and the laying off of "millions of workers," overstating the job losses in those industries, which his own adviser put at under 100,000.

Coming on the same day that 11 US allies -- but not the US -- sign a landmark Asia-Pacific trade agreement, the move on tariffs only underscores Trump's embrace of the protectionist policies he believes helped him win the presidency.

At the end of World War II, huge swaths of Europe and Asia had been reduced to ruins. Borders were redrawn and homecomings, expulsions, and burials were under way. But the massive efforts to rebuild had just begun. When the war began in the late 1930s, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. In less than a decade, the war between the Axis the Allied powers had resulted in 80 million deaths -- killing off about 4 percent of the whole world.

Allied forces now became occupiers, taking control of Germany, Japan, and much of the territory they had formerly ruled. Efforts were made to permanently dismantle the war-making abilities of those nations, as factories were destroyed and former leadership was removed or prosecuted.

The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine paved the way for Israel to declare its independence in 1948 and marked the start of the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. The growing tensions between Western powers and the Soviet Eastern Bloc developed into the Cold War, and the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons raised the very real specter of an unimaginable World War III if common ground could not be found.

Donald J. Trump is suddenly embracing an unlikely ally: The document-spilling group WikiLeaks,

increasingly seizing on a trove of embarrassing emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign

an extraordinary turnabout after years of bipartisan criticism of the organization

Before the news cycle—and the president himself—got consumed with the new White House tell-all last week, Donald Trump made a good foreign policy decision, albeit seemingly in haste. The administration announced it was suspending security assistance to Pakistan, on the grounds that the country is continuing to arm, assist, fund, and provide sanctuary to a wide array of Islamist militant groups that are murdering U.S. troops and their allies in Afghanistan. Well-placed sources involved with calculating the relevant funds have told me that this was not a planned policy and took the other agencies, not to mention the Pakistanis, by complete surprise. Rather it was an ex post facto response to Trump’s January 1, 2018 tweet vituperatively repining that:

The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!

The United States was well into the surge at this point; between NATO forces and Afghan forces, there were hundreds of thousands of troops to resupply, all of whom had relied on the routes through Pakistan. The need to find alternative routes by land and air—including through Central Asia—ended up costing the Americans about $100 million per month more than the previous arrangement. Many feared that while this worked to get supplies into Afghanistan, it would not be sufficient to get massive amounts of war materiel out of Afghanistan when the United States and NATO withdrew. Consequently, the U.S. government hoped that Pakistan would reopen the ground routes. But it turns out that weaning itself off them was not such a bad option after all.

The long and distinguished annals of the British army contain numerous examples of courage, endurance and devotion to duty

The one hundred and thirty-six day defence of Alicante belongs to the latter category, and it is fitting in this, the two hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the siege, to recall the bravery of the Allied garrison, and above all of the man who was the very soul and inspiration of the defence both before and after his gallant death, namely the Governor, Major-General John Richards

The War of the Spanish Succession was more than five years old before Alicante figured in its history. Three campaigns had already been fought in the Iberian Peninsula when an Allied force appeared in the offing, determined to secure Alicante for the cause of the Habsburg claimant to the throne of Spain, Charles III (later the Emperor Charles VI).

This was the reputation acquired by Francis the First in his own time and reverently preserved by subsequent generations. His mother, Louise of Savoy, laid its foundation even before it was certain that he would inherit the throne of his second cousin, Louis XII. In 1504 she had a medallion engraved in honour of the ten-year-old Duke of Valois

While Francis I has been remembered as the chivalrous leader who sustained a long and unequal struggle against the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, he has also been described as the King of the Renaissance

There are, however, other aspects of Francis I that are less consistent with the popular impression. He was the autocrat who built upon the work of Louis XI in creating the despotism of the new monarchy.

On Louis’ death in January 1515 Francis duly became king of France at the age of twenty

In September 1515 Francis I once more asserted the French claim to Milan

In the spring of 1537, once more under Montmorency, the French attacked Artois in the Netherlands and a number of towns were captured before a truce was agreed with Charles’s regent, Mary of Hungary

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.

original name Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte

French Revolutionary general and marshal of France (1804), who was elected crown prince of Sweden (1810), becoming regent and then king of Sweden and Norway (1818–44).

formed Swedish alliances with Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia, which defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig (1813)

The Trump administration said on Thursday that it would impose steep tariffs on metals imported from its closest allies, provoking retaliation against American businesses and consumers and further straining diplomatic ties tested by the president’s combative approach.

The tariffs “have already had major, positive effects on steel and aluminum workers and jobs and will continue to do so long into the future,” White House officials said in a statement. “At the same time, the Trump administration’s actions underscore its commitment to good-faith negotiations with our allies to enhance our national security while supporting American workers.”

Although the Trump administration signaled a tougher stance with the tariffs, it also left open the possibility for continued negotiations with affected countries.