In March 1968, a K-129 Soviet nuclear submarine cruising in the Pacific Ocean mysteriously disappeared from Russian radar. Following an…
Bad Blood: The Sino-Soviet Split and the U.S. Normalization with China
In the 1960s, in the depths of the Cold War, the world was viewed in terms of a zero-sum game:…
When Friends Spy on Friends: The Case of Jonathan Pollard
Former Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard delivered over 800 highly classified documents to the Israeli government over a 17-month…
Operation Storm — The Battle for Croatia, 1995
After the fall of Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s, the Balkans descended into a bloody ethnic and sectarian conflict. Although…
East Germany Builds the Berlin Wall
The summer of 1961 was fraught with tensions between Moscow and Washington. Berlin, which had been a Cold War flash…
Jesse Helms: The Senator Who Just Said No
Jesse Alexander Helms, a five-term Republican Senator (1973- 2003) from North Carolina, was known not only for his conservative beliefs…
The Extra Special Relationship: Thatcher, Reagan, and the 1980s
The “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom has served to unite the two nations over the…
The Neutron Bomb — A Negotiating Dud
The neutron bomb, a low-yield thermonuclear weapon which would be especially lethal to enemy ground troops but would not seriously…
Modern Turkey’s History of Military Coups
The July 2016 attempted coup d’état in Turkey was the latest in a series of military interventions in the nation’s…
The U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands gets Addicted to Pac-Man
July 2016 saw the explosion of the global phenomenon Pokémon Go, where people walk around town (and often into traffic…