Sublime

“No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance,” Clausewitz writes of war in On War. It’s a “paradoxical trinity,” composed of the passions that cause combatants to risk their lives, the skill of their commanders, and the coherence of the political objectives for which the war is being fought. Only the last is fully

His strategy of humility was composed of four elements: accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe.

It’s not clear whether Lincoln recalled, or even had read, Adams’s message to Congress in 1825. Both shared, though, this central point: that “liberty is power,” and that “the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.”87 To that end, Lincoln

Thucydides wouldn’t have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a

Without criticizing Hobbes’s metaphysics or ethics, there are two points to make against him. The first is that he always considers the national interest as a whole, and assumes, tacitly, that the major interests of all citizens are the same. He does not realize the importance of the clash between different classes, which Marx makes the chief cause

In fact, the Reagan administration was forced to create a major propaganda office, the Office of Public Diplomacy: it’s not the first one in American history, it’s the second, the first was during the Wilson administration in 1917. But this one was much larger, much more extensive, it was a major effort at indoctrinating the public.

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

Lincoln said nothing of slaves held in states remaining loyal: he could hardly have claimed war powers if not at war with them.80 He also knew, though, that he didn’t have to: the more blood the Union shed the more just—and, therefore, the more legitimate—emancipation would become. The proclamation, in this sense, was Lincoln’s Tarutino: with no mo