Roundup: Historians' Take

Jeremy Bernstein: Where Those Reactors and Centrifuges Came From

[Jeremy Bernstein is the author of the forthcoming “Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element.”] THE six-party agreement signed with North Korea last month should certainly be applauded as a necessary first step in improving relations with the United States. While a good deal of the North Korean program is shrouded in mystery — just this week the United States again urged the North Koreans to disclose any uranium-enrichment activities — there are some things we do k

Stephen Kotkin: Russia under Putin ... Toward Democracy or Dictatorship?

Prof. Kotkin is a professor of history and the director of Russian and Eurasian Studies program at Princeton University. His books include Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. He is chair of the editorial board of Princeton University Press and a consultant to the Open Society Institute and other foundations active in Eurasia. He reviews business books for The New York Times on Sundays. His essays have also appeared in The New Yor

Paul Starr: Is war fatal to liberalism? History suggests a different story.

[Paul Starr is professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. His new book, Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism, will be published this spring by Basic Books.] War is always a risky enterprise for the political party or ideological faction that undertakes it. Like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War has broken the grip on national power of a dominant party that had been confidently reshaping American politics. Democracies want speedy victories, especially if

Tom Engelhardt: What We Know About Waste and War in Iraq

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.] Let's

Tom Engelhardt: Will Iraq Become the Democrats' War?

Nothing reminds us more of how much the American constitutional system has been transformed, of just how extreme the "imperial presidency" has become, than Congress's generally woeful record in the second half of the last century and in the first years of this one to exert any significant control over or brakes on White House wars abroad. On such issues, Congress has generally lagged well behind public opinion -- as in Vietnam, where its greatest power, the power of the purse, led to p

Walid Phares: Muslims against Jihad?

[Dr Walid Phares is a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of Future Jihad and the forthcoming War of Ideas.] A peculiar conference, taking place on the West coast of Florida drew the attention of many observers of the War of ideas: The first Secular Islam Summit. Organized by the Center for Inquiry Transnational and activists, the meeting included two dozens of speakers and about two hundred participants from various backgrounds and nation

Ira Chernus: Will We Suffer from the Iraq Syndrome?

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu.] The Iraq syndrome is headed our way. Perhaps it's already here. A clear and growing majority of Americans now tell pollsters that that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake, that it's a bad

Daniel Pipes: Europe's Stark Options

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Europe's long-term relations with its burgeoning Muslim minority, the continent's most critical issue, will follow one of three paths: harmonious integration, the expulsion of Muslims, or an Islamic takeover. Which of these scenarios will most likely play out?Europe's

Niall Ferguson: Hatred of America unites the world

Being hated is no fun. Few of us are like those pantomime villains who glory in the hisses and boos of an audience. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've been asked the plaintive question: "Why do they hate us?" and another for each of the different answers I've heard. It's because of our foreign policy. It's because of their extremism. It's because of our arrogance. It's because of their inferiority complex. Americans really hat

Frank Askin: Rehnquist's legacy still haunts those who finish their prison sentence yet still can't vote

[Frank Askin is professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark and a general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is the author of Defending Rights: A Life in Law and Politics (1997).] It is refreshing to see that the unsavory history of our late Chief Justice William Rehnquist is at last getting a fresh examination as a consequence of the release of FBI files in January under the Fre

Chalmers Johnson: 737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire

[From the book NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006 by Chalmers Johnson. All rights reserved. Posted on Japan Focus, February 20, 2007. Mr. Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific.]

Larry Portis: Zionism and the United States ... The Similarities

[Larry Portis is a professor of American studies at the University of Montpellier, France and a founding member of Americans for Peace and Justice in Montpellier. He can be contacted at larry.portis@univ-montp3.fr] Not long ago, I met Eyal Naveh, an Israeli historian, who explains that the United States has been the "model" for the Israeli state and society. He claims that the US was first a model for the Zionist pioneers, then for th

Maurice Isserman: How Old Is the New SDS?

[Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. He is author of, among other works, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (Basic Books, 1987), and co-author with Michael Kazin of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2000), which will be available in its third, revised edition in March.] In the summer of 1960, the noted American poet Kenneth Rexroth issued a warning to college undergraduates.

Ruth Rosen: The Care Crisis

[Ruth Rosen, a historian, journalist and senior fellow at the Longview Institute, teaches history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America.] A baby is born. A child develops a high fever. A spouse breaks a leg. A parent suf

Eric Foner: Lincoln's Antiwar Record

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author, most recently, of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.] An old marketing adage states that no product exists whose sales cannot be improved by associating it with Abraham Lincoln. The sa

Toby Dodge: Failing in Baghdad -- The British Did It First

[Toby Dodge, author of "Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied" (Columbia Univ. Press), is associate professor of international politics at the University of London and a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. ] At the center of Baghdad's neglected North Gate War Cemetery, near the edge of the old city walls, stands an imposing grave. Sheltered from the weather by a grandiose red sandstone cupola, it is the final re

Daniel Pipes: Next Steps in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] I'm in broad agreement with almost everything that has been said. What I'd like to do is complement it by looking at what one might call the big picture. You asked in the title of this hearing, "Next Steps in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process."

Godfrey Hodgson: Bullying will not forever eclipse idealism in US Foreign Policy

[Godfrey Hodgson is the author of More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton University Press, 2004) .] Jan Morris spoke for many around the world in a piece in the Guardian on 14 February 2007 in which she admitted to disenchantment with what the United States has become. "[The] missionary instinct", she wrote, "which impelled Americans into so many noble policies, was to be perverted by power". And even, "[far] from being the

Jonathan Zimmerman: The long road Africa took to the split with the Episcopal church of America

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] HEY, the Africans are trying to impose their culture on us! That's what Episcopalians in the United States are saying about last week's summit in Tanzania, where global Anglican leaders urged Americans to bar homosexuals from becoming bishops and to stop blessing same-sex unions. As The New York Times reported, Episcopa

Juan Cole: The British retreat from Iraq brings peril for U.S. troops

[Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).] Tony Blair's announcement that Britain would withdraw 1,600 troops from southern Iraq by May, and aim for further significant withdrawals by the end of 2007, drew praise from U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. "What I see," said Cheney, "is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of I