Sublime

despite the arrival of

The third section is devoted to the Cold War, the four-decade period following the end of World War II that was dominated by the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. It looks at why the Cold War broke out, why it stayed cold, and why it ended when and how it did. The fourth and final history chapter assesses the post‒Cold War pe

At the war’s end, the United States possessed the world’s fourth-largest empire, accounted for more than half the world’s manufacturing production, and had atom bombs. Why not conquer the globe? But of course, that’s not what happened. Not even close. Instead, the United States and its allies did something highly unusual: they won a war and gave up

With the Ottoman Empire reigning in the newly named Istanbul, the ancient silk routes and sea routes to Asia were at risk.

Globally, America has grown more alarmed about its enemies, less generous toward its friends, more wary of everybody.

President Wilson’s belief that founding the League of Nations would be the best guarantee against future aggression by Germany—or anyone else—was not universally shared. In particular, France, led by Georges Clemenceau, the host of the Paris Peace Conference that was to bring a formal end to World War I, was preoccupied with ensuring that Germany w

EUROPE, TOO, WAS EXPERIENCING seismic shifts. In late 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. By 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and the United States stood alone as the world’s uncontested superpower. Ever since Israel’s founding, Israel and its Arab neighbor-enemies had been caught in a larger battle between the world’s two superpowers. American-R

As wars go, the Second World War was the big one—a giant, planetwide entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses. No war has ever killed more or even come close. From Dresden, Warsaw, Manila, Tokyo, and Hiroshima, that’s what the war looked like: a vortex of carnage. Yet, ironically, p