Edward Luttwak

Frances Stonor Saunders writes that in September 1940 King Carol of Romania ‘crossed the border into Hungary at Temesvár, which had been Timișoara only a week before’ (LRB, 13 August). In fact, then as now, my mother’s home town remained Timișoara. Hitler awarded only the northern Banat to Hungary, where towns indeed switched from Romanian to Hungarian names. My own Arad also remained Romanian,...

Josephine Quinn writes: ‘In 1976 Edward Luttwak in The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire tried to explain [the huge Roman effort in Masada] as a lesson to others contemplating revolt: “The Romans would pursue rebellion even to mountain tops in remote deserts to destroy its last vestiges regardless of cost"’ (LRB, 12 September). ‘If so,’ Quinn continues, ‘other historians have pointed out,...

Marc Dubin’s Latin American specialist declared that his career had been compromised because of his principled refusal to draw up a feasibility study for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union (Letters, 21 March). The notion that nuclear strike plans of any sort would be drawn up by a Latin America specialist or any number of them is fantastical in itself, and of course by the time Ronald...

The LRB has by now published quite a lot about Donald Trump, none of it laudatory, much of it contemptuous, most recently by Jonathan Lethem (LRB, 15 December 2016). I happen to believe that Trump has three perfectly realistic ways of fulfilling his promises to his voters and ensuring his re-election. His first big idea is to build more than a trillion dollars’ worth of much needed infrastructure...

Tariq Ali’s explanation of the Charlie Hebdo affair will not do (LRB, 5 February). ‘The real problem is not a secret,’ he writes. ‘Western intelligence services regularly tell their leaders that the radicalisation of a tiny sliver of young Muslims … is a result of US foreign policy over the last decade and a half.’ How does US foreign policy over the last decade and a half explain the protracted...