For many visitors, Budapest casts a spellbinding beauty, sparkling with ageless jewels like Saint Stephen’s Basilica and the fin de siecle House of Parliament. Beneath this surface of gothic grandeur however, a determined fight is being waged for control of Hungary’s historical narrative, and thus for direction of its future progress. This fight is most...
Charismatic leaders, from George Washington to Nelson Mandela, have dominated political revolutions in many nations. More important than their charisma itself though, at least once the Bastille is stormed, is how these leaders channel charisma into a constitutional order. France’s twentieth-century experience with presidentialism provides a particularly rich example of this process, and exposes the...
“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” Edmund Burke observed. At the turn of the twentieth century, both France and Germany were wooing Great Britain as an ally against the other. Why was it France, Britain’s nemesis for centuries, which succeeded in gaining British friendship? The answer is complex, but a large part...
Taiwan has long been an epicenter of great power tension, perhaps most dangerously so during the early 1950s. Following his defeat by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang supporters withdrew to Taiwan, planning to regroup and return to the mainland in force. With the U.S. Navy lying athwart the...
President John F. Kennedy arrived in Vienna sixty years ago with lofty expectations for a Cold War breakthrough. But rather than alleviating U.S.-Soviet tensions as Kennedy had hoped, his conference with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instead precipitated a summer of crisis in Berlin, the perennial flashpoint of the Cold War. Probing Kennedy’s resolve, Khrushchev reissued...
In October 1994, the Clinton administration had momentous news to share with the world. It had reached an agreement with North Korea to incrementally achieve normalization and denuclearization. Pyongyang pledged to freeze and dismantle its nuclear reactors, submit to international inspections and comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The U.S. promised North Korea financing for...
