Sublime

Sadat became the first Arab leader to address the Knesset. He laid out five conditions for peace: Israel’s complete return to the 1967 borders, independence for the Palestinians, the right for all to live in peace and security, a commitment not to resort to arms in the future, and the end of belligerency in the Middle East. Sadat’s demands were ste

Johnson introduced fewer pieces of legislation than any congressman who served in Congress during the same years as he.

As the violence continued, President Clinton attempted one last-ditch effort to resuscitate the peace process. In late December 2000, Clinton presented his proposal, “The Clinton Parameters,” which proposed that the new Palestinian state would include 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (though the parameters did not mention Gaza, Clinton clarified i

WITH THE GAZA EVACUATION complete, getting Israel disentangled from Palestinians on the West Bank was next on Sharon’s docket. To smooth his political path, he left the Likud and in November 2005 formed his own party, Kadima Yisrael (“Forward, Israel!”), recruiting centrists from both Labor and Likud. But four months after the Gaza disengagement, S

The first is to preserve their society by manipulating circumstances rather than being overwhelmed by them. Such leaders will embrace change and progress, while ensuring that their society retains its basic sense of itself through the evolutions they encourage within it. The second is to temper vision with wariness, entertaining a sense of limits.

In his opening address at the 1945 war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson accused Nazi leaders of assaulting “all those dignities and freedoms that we hold [as] natural and in­alienable rights in every human be­ing.” The horrific negation of those rights — by the agents of totalitarianism — threatened the fabric o

As president-elect he recruited a cabinet of frustrated first lovers or, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has called it, a “team of rivals.” They included his major competitors at Chicago—the indignantly disappointed Seward as secretary of state, the transparently ambitious Salmon P. Chase of Ohio as treasury secretary, the corrupt but politic

The two alliances—a U.S.-led NATO in Western Europe and a Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe—also reached an understanding governing political order in Europe. The Final Act that emerged in 1975 in Helsinki from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe declared the impermissibility of the threat or use of force, the inviolab

Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union starting in 1985, played a pivotal role in the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev clearly concluded that the Soviet Union could survive and compete on the world stage only if it changed in fundamental ways at home. But his approach to change, in which political reform came before economic restructuring, mostl