Sublime

For the people of Delhi, the daily reality of what happened in 1857 was not so much liberation as violence, uncertainty and starvation. Indeed, reading through the Mutiny Papers there are times when it seems almost as if the siege of Delhi had become a three-cornered contest, with the sepoys and the British fighting it out, and with the people in D

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

Once his colleagues had been intimidated into silence and Iran’s Shi‘ite majority stirred into action, Khomeini was free to seize control of the transitional government. Before most Iranians knew what they had accepted, he had used his popular mandate to inject his theological beliefs into the political realm, transforming Iran into the Islamic Rep

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

The EU, by far the most significant regional arrangement, is struggling with disputes over migration, economic policy, and the division of responsibility between itself and its members. And around the world, countries are increasingly resisting U.S. primacy. For its part, the United States, divided politically and stretched militarily after prolong

The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran’s revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution.