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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, USAID made Central Asia a top priority—“no matter where you were posted and where you were on your current assignment” employees were urged to head there. Jonathan Addleton was working for USAID in post-apartheid South Africa. Central Asia intrigued him, and the organization quickly agreed to send Addleton […]
On October 9, 1983, while South Korean President Chun Doo-Hwan was on a visit to Rangoon, Burma to lay a wreath at the Martyr’s Mausoleum of Swedagon Pagoda, a bomb concealed in the roof exploded, killing 21 people including four senior South Korean officials. President Chun was spared because his car had been delayed in […]
Idi Amin Dada, who came to be known as the “Butcher of Uganda,” rose to officer rank in the Ugandan Army before its independence from British colonial administration in 1962. Associated with the newly-sovereign nation’s President and Prime Minister Milton Obote, he staged a military coup and usurped the role of president on January 25, […]
Sport has often been used throughout history as a political tool. In particular, sport boycotts have been effective measures for countries to express disdain and condemnation for the actions of another. In the last half of the 20th Century, the more famous boycotts were imposed as a response to apartheid policies in South Africa during […]
The Olympic Games represent the height of sporting diplomacy, with thousands of athletes transcending politics for two weeks as they represent their countries on the world stage. While the athletic spectacles entrance and amaze on television, without the behind-the-scenes political efforts and negotiations, there would be no Olympic Games. For many countries, hosting the Olympics […]
Someone once described the dissolution of the USSR as a typical Soviet divorce — you’re no longer married but you’re still forced to live in the same apartment. So it is with North and South Korea, which have had more than their share of animosity the past half century, which has, not surprisingly, affected the […]
The ongoing Eurozone crisis has taken on the dimensions of a long, repetitive Greek drama. After years of imposed austerity, Greece voted against accepting the bailout terms proposed by its EU creditors in a referendum in early July 2015, only to see the leftist government under Prime MinisterAlexis Tsipras accept another bailout in exchange for […]
In 1972, a group of Palestinian terrorists shocked the world by kidnapping eleven Israeli athletes during the Summer Olympics in Munich. They called themselves Black September. This name has its roots in the infamous “Black September” of 1970: a month of bloody fighting in Jordan between the forces of Jordanian King Hussein bin Talal and […]
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, among other things, a horrible political miscalculation, lasting nine bloody years and resulting in the death of some one million civilians as well as forcing millions of others to flee the country. It led to another cold spell in U.S.-Soviet relations as the Carter administration responded by boycotting the USSR’s […]
It was to last nearly a decade and would plant the seeds for the rise of the Taliban and Islamic terrorism and the subsequent invasion by the U.S. more than 20 years later. On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan and immediately assumed complete military and political control of […]
