30 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Last weekend, I found myself in my kitchen cooking dinner and humming a song from decades ago. The German rock band “Scorpions” had a global hit in the song “Wind of Change” that may be my favorite “end of the Cold War” song. I searched for the music video on my phone, and as I watched it, I was reminded that November 9th marks the 30th anniversary of the fall … Read More
Democracy is America’s Most Potent Asset
The next American president should get back to celebrating the moral power of democracy. This was standard fare for President Ronald Reagan—in fact it was pretty standard throughout the Cold War. The fact that democracy promotion is little more than a slogan and not a centerpiece of American foreign policy is a mistake. We are leaving our most powerful asset unused in the global competition that will shape the 21st … Read More
Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War with William Taubman
Air Dates: June 17-23, 2019 Mikhail Gorbachev is one of the most important figures of the 20th century. A child of the Soviet Union, and a fast rising star in the Communist Party, Gorbachev was also a democratizer whose reforms led to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. William Taubman has authored the definitive biography of the last Soviet leader. William Taubman is … Read More
Are the United States and China in a New Cold War?
The Texas National Security Review recently gathered a group of Asia-watchers and historically-minded scholars to discuss whether the tensions between the United States and China amount to a 21st century Cold War. Senior Fellow Iskander Rehman chaired the roundtable, providing the following introductory essay : For over two decades, Western academics and policymakers have struggled to define the nature and scope of the challenge posed by China’s rise.1 In the early 1990s, the … Read More
Watching Ukraine, Thinking about 1956 & U.S. Strategy
In the summer of 1956, riots broke out in Poznan, Poland, inspired, primarily, by grievances over wage reductions. The forces of dissent however grew beyond those economic grievances to express discontent with a range of issues, most notably the influence of the Soviet Union and the presence of Soviet forces in Poland. These local issues were swept up into the Cold War along with the process of de-Stalinization and the … Read More