After the 1985 Geneva Summit, where President Ronald Reagan and leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, met for the first…
Brexit — Now What?
The decision by referendum of the British electorate to depart the European Union — after a campaign in which facts…
“A Box Sealed for 70 years” — Opening U.S. Embassy Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
A mountainous country in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan was ceded by China and formally incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1876.…
Resolving the Czechoslovak Gold Dispute
As the Third Reich annexed the Sudetenland and Poland and the German war machine pushed through the Eastern Front towards…
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea — The CIA Mission to Raise a Soviet Sub
In March 1968, a K-129 Soviet nuclear submarine cruising in the Pacific Ocean mysteriously disappeared from Russian radar. Following an…
China’s Fight for Tiny Islands — The Taiwan Straits Crises, 1954-58
Recent disagreements over Beijing’s claim to the South China Seas (in which a tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on the…
Persistence, Vision and Luck: Creating a Center for Diplomatic Training
Can you imagine the bureaucratic struggles involved in persuading the Department of Defense to hand over acres of prime real…
Agent Orange and the Vietnam War
In 1961, United States forces in Vietnam began to use chemical herbicides and defoliants on South Vietnamese crops, bushes, and…
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:…
Far from the Madding Crowd — Leeds Castle and the Road to Camp David
“Where you stand depends on where you sit” – an oft-heard epigram used to describe negotiations. And it’s true –…