We look at it and see ourselves

Bruce Cumings: Fantasies of Korea, 15 December 2005

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty 
by Bradley Martin.
Dunne, 868 pp., $29.95, October 2004, 0 312 32221 6
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Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea 
by Jasper Becker.
Oxford, 300 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 9780195170443
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... evidence turned up of a clear connection to Moscow. This information is never balanced with facts we learned long before: that Stalin ordered every Korean agent in the Comintern shot in the late 1930s and began his many mass relocations of subject populations by moving 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (tens of thousands ...

How can it work?

David Runciman: American Democracy, 21 March 2013

... to deliver on its best intentions. Still, the promise has never entirely dissipated. And now we have a mixture of all these views of American democracy: lingering ideas of the promise, a continuing sense of the power, an ongoing preoccupation with the violence, but behind it all a return to the thought that was there at the beginning. It is starting to ...

Short Cuts

John Sturrock: Blair’s Convictions, 24 May 2007

... Had the Labour Party he led borne even a passing resemblance to the Labour Party we thought we had elected into government in 1997, we would not have had to endure the unnecessary and insulting performance that Tony Blair put on last week in the uterine comfort of his constituency in the North-East: that other Labour Party could never have followed him so slavishly wherever he chose to take them in the wake of George Bush, would have known it needed at all costs to replace him for its own long-term good, let alone ours, and so never allowed him the chance of fixing as he very theatrically has the mise-en-scène of a voluntary resignation ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: In Washington, 20 August 1992

... lead, Professor Roy Fair of Yale came up with a political/electoral ‘model’ that predicted a Bush victory with 52.2 per cent of the votes cast. In the event, Bush look 53.8 per cent, which was enough for an Electoral College landslide. So I wondered what rune Professor Fair (one of those pundits with ideal names for ...

I blame Foucault

Jenny Diski: Bush’s Women, 22 September 2005

Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species 
by Laura Flanders.
Verso, 342 pp., £10, July 2005, 1 84467 530 0
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... W. stands for women,’ cried Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Elaine Chao and Gale Ann Norton at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and in case the Good Ol’ Boy’s good old ladies didn’t get it, a banner explained: ‘The country and my administration have benefited from the strong women who serve as senior members of my White House team ...

Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers

David Runciman: Bush and the ‘Death Tax’, 2 June 2005

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth 
by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro.
Princeton, 392 pp., $29.95, March 2005, 0 691 12293 8
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... Cuts is something different. It tells the story of the campaign to repeal the estate tax (what we would call inheritance tax) in the United States, which culminated in the inclusion of the measure in George Bush’s massive tax-cutting legislation of 2001. Don’t let that put you off. This is one of the most ...

Short Cuts

Mattathias Schwartz: John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness, 16 July 2020

... have become less and less popular in the aftermath of 9/11. As ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush, he pushed the false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Cuba was developing biological weapons. In his view, America’s enemies are generally not to be negotiated with. Why trust ...

They’re just not ready

Neal Ascherson: Gorbachev Betrayed, 7 January 2010

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment 
by Stephen Kotkin, with Jan Gross.
Modern Library, 240 pp., $24, October 2009, 978 0 679 64276 3
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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 
by Victor Sebestyen.
Weidenfeld, 451 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 297 85223 0
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There Is No Freedom without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War that Brought Down Communism 
by Constantine Pleshakov.
Farrar, Straus, 289 pp., $26, November 2009, 978 0 374 28902 7
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1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe 
by Mary Elise Sarotte.
Princeton, 321 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 14306 4
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... big Soviet troop reductions in East-Central Europe. Early in 1989, the new American president, George H.W. Bush, still assumed that Gorbachev was ‘too good to be true’. General Scowcroft, his national security adviser, suggested he was ‘potentially more dangerous than his predecessors’. Dick Cheney, then the ...

Exquisite Americana

Tom Stevenson: Trump and US Power, 5 December 2024

... security adviser, Mike Waltz, is a Floridian soldier who wouldn’t have been out of place in George W. Bush’s team. Waltz has spent much of the last few years raging about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which he believes will lead to ‘al-Qaida 3.0’. On Russia and the war in Ukraine he complained ...

Anwar Awlaki’s Blog

Theo Padnos: In Yemen, 28 January 2010

... he has done? … May Allah grant our brother Nidal patience, perseverance and steadfastness, and we ask Allah to accept from him his great heroic act. Awlaki was writing from Yemen, where to commend an attack on American soldiers as they prepare for deployment in Muslim countries is such a commonplace that it is unlikely to attract much attention. But the ...

Imperial Graveyard

Samuel Moyn: Richard Holbrooke, 6 February 2020

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century 
by George Packer.
Cape, 592 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 1 910702 92 5
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... capacity for mythmaking rather than the resuscitation of the ‘liberal international order’.George Packer, arguably the most renowned American journalist of his generation, is more aware of the dangers of hagiography than most members of Holbrooke’s mourning party. He wrote a profile of him for the New Yorker in 2009, during Holbrooke’s ‘last ...

A Lucrative War

Ben Ehrenreich: Mexico’s Drug Business, 21 October 2010

The Last Narco: Hunting El Chapo, the World’s Most Wanted Drug Lord 
by Malcolm Beith.
Penguin, 261 pp., £9.99, September 2010, 978 0 14 104839 0
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... Drug Enforcement Agency officer working undercover in Mexico was kidnapped and killed, the first Bush administration pushed hard for Félix Gallardo’s arrest. Negotiations for the trade pact that would later be known as the North American Free Trade Agreement were underway and Salinas wanted to keep the Americans happy, so in 1989, Félix Gallardo was ...

Megaton Man

Steven Shapin: The Original Dr Strangelove, 25 April 2002

Memoirs: A 20th-Century Journey in Science and Politics 
by Edward Teller and Judith Shoolery.
Perseus, 628 pp., £24.99, January 2002, 1 903985 12 9
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... set in motion which, with his energetic assistance, would eventually lead to its abrogation by George W. Bush. In 1966, Teller met Ronald Reagan, then running for the governorship of California, and, once elected, Reagan accepted his invitation to tour the Livermore lab, where Teller and his colleagues told him about ...

Should we say thank you?

Hugh Wilford: The Overrated Marshall Plan, 30 April 2009

The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe 
by Greg Behrman.
Aurum, 448 pp., £25, February 2008, 978 1 84513 326 9
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Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower 
by Nicolaus Mills.
Wiley, 290 pp., £15.99, August 2008, 978 0 470 09755 7
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... for reconstructing Europe after the Second World War, named after the US secretary of state, George C. Marshall. Between April 1948, when President Truman signed it into law, and the end of 1951, the European Recovery Programme (ERP) poured more than $13 billion of aid into Western Europe – roughly equivalent to $550 billion as a share of current US ...

Diary

Sherry Turkle: The Hillary Wars, 22 October 1992

... in jobs and pay and of decent education and health care for everyone. Join her. Join Bill. We can make the future. I remember how I felt listening to John Kennedy’s inaugural address as a 12-year-old schoolgirl. I was excited but anxious, aware that I was too young. It wasn’t yet time for my generation. Perhaps it would be time now. Embarrassed by ...