Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

Washington doesn’t have the luxury of simply avoiding insurgencies, so it needs to figure out how to fight them better. Drawn from more than a decade of war, here are 10 lessons for doing so.

To create broad-based and sustainable economic growth, governments in the developing world should foster market-creating innovation - that is, the generation of new products and services that reach an entirely new population of customers.

Indonesia’s new president talks to Foreign Affairs about his recent victory, his national agenda, and the threat of Islamic extremism.

The anger of less educated white voters in rural and exurban areas that Trump tapped into so effectively has been building for half a century. Its roots lie in Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and only by understanding the mistakes made in that war can politicians hope to heal the country’s wounds.

The nuclear deal that the United States and five other great powers signed with Iran in July 2015 is the final product of a decade-long effort at arms control. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ranks as one of the most deficient arms control agreements in history. But Barack Obama has pledged to spend the remainder of his tenure fending off congressional pressure to adjust its terms. An even larger issue is Washington’s lack of a comprehensive Iran policy.

In the century ahead, U.S. strategic interests will align closely with those of India, and so keeping the U.S.-India relationship strong is crucial. The Obama administration needs to make Delhi a higher priority.

Since the early 1990s, a handful of oligarchs has dominated Greece’s economy and politics. So long as these elites have a vested interest in keeping things as they are, the country will never fully find its way out of crisis.

Scholars have long known that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi, but many doubted that his philosophy had anything to do with Hitler’s ideology. Now Peter Trawny, drawing on Heidegger’s hidden notebooks, argues that the philosopher’s anti-Semitism was deeply entwined with his ideas.

On March 30, 2008, several hundred people gathered at the waterfront in San Francisco. They had come to witness the unveiling of a monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: 2,800 Americans who joined some 35,000 other volunteers from more than 50 countries to defend the Spanish Republic against fascist forces during Spain’s civil war. The conflict, which raged from 1936 until 1939, led to the deaths of around half a million people, including at least 750 Americans.

For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country’s capabilities. Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass. By 1900, it was the world’s fourth or fifth-largest industrial power and the largest agricultural producer in Europe.

The 18th-century British politician and writer Edmund Burke is often called the father of modern conservatism. A new intellectual biography of Burke shows why that label fails to capture the complexity of Burke's thought and legacy.

During the Cold War, the United States preferred to husband, rather than expend, its military power. The idea was not to fight but to defend, deter, and contain, a cold peace infinitely preferable to nuclear cataclysm. When US policymakers strayed from this principle, attempting to unify the Korean Peninsula in 1950 or deploying combat troops to Vietnam in the 1960s, the results proved unhappy in the extreme.

Two days before the collapse of Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt, one man gathered the courage to tell the president the truth: he would be killed in his palace if he did not step down. What came next revealed the bitter power struggles atop the most populous country in the Middle East at its most vulnerable moment in six decades. This is the inside story of the final days of Egypt's modern day pharaoh, who ruled with near autocratic powers for three decades before being forced to resign on February 11, 2011.

What's fascinating about Dani Shapiro's story "Supernova" is "its focus on the minor catastrophe that is Shenkman, a relatively prosperous man whose minor shortcomings feel, to him alone, monumental and impossible to overlook," writes Benjamin Samuel, co-editor of Electric Literature, in his introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. "Despite rowing every day, obsessively racing against an old rival in a computerized simulation, nobody even knows Shenkman is still competing."

Set in San Francisco and North Carolina, the linked stories in Damn Love introduce us to characters struggling with love in all its complicated forms, including a young doctor getting over a breakup with the help of a patient, a newly married gay man who reconnects with his estranged mother, a trio of physicists caught in a surprising love triangle, and a soldier who takes secrets with her to the Iraqi desert.

The populism that Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of Andrew Jackson. Jacksonians are skeptical about the value of liberal order building, so the challenge for international politics in the days ahead is to find a way to stop the liberal order’s erosion.

Thirty-five years now. Through American invasions and wars, and famines and genocides, and tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes, George Waite’s red, white, and blue mail truck has lurched from mailbox to mailbox with the utter predictability of a brightly painted figure on a cuckoo clock.

Six moving profiles reveal the complex realities behind gun violence in the United States. Author Daniel J. Patinkin exhaustively interviewed each of six shooters about their life experiences and about the unique circumstances that compelled them to use a firearm against another person. The result is a series of profound narratives that is sure to distress and challenge the listener, but also, perhaps, to provide enlightenment and inspiration.

Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. This means that the real winners of the future will be neither the providers of cheap labor nor the owners of ordinary capital, but rather those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.

After living in the White House for four years, in November 1980, Jimmy Carter lost the presidential election to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide. Carter's unpopularity helped Republicans win seats in the House and gain control over the Senate for the first time in over 20 years. The Reagan Era had begun, ushering in a generation of conservative power. Democrats blamed Carter for this catastrophe and spent the next decade pretending he had never existed.