After the 1985 Geneva Summit, where President Ronald Reagan and leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, met for the first…
Anwar Sadat and the Camp David Negotiations
The Camp David Accords, which were negotiated over a period of twelve days in 1978 between Egyptian, Israeli, and American…
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…
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:…
Observing the Fiftieth Anniversary of VJ-Day in Japan
How to commemorate an important anniversary of the country in which you’re posted when it marks a low point in…
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…
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…
The Marooned Law of the Sea Treaty
The Law of the Sea Treaty (formally known as the Third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,…
The U.S. Returns Okinawa to Japan, 1971
In 1945, towards the end of World War II, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps invaded Okinawa with 185,000 troops; a third of the…