On May 25, 1985, seventy-three South Korean students barged into the United States Information Services (USIS) library in Seoul and…
Negotiating the Mexican-American Border: the Case of Chamizal
Defining the border between Mexico and the United States has not always been in the hands of politicians; at one…
Chipping Away at Czechoslovak Communism: The Helsinki Final Act and Charter 77
The Solidarity Movement. Perestroika and Glasnost. The fall of the Berlin Wall. All of these movements, policies, or events had…
Bombing North Vietnam into Accepting Our Concessions: Christmas Bombings, 1972
President Richard Nixon ordered plans for retaliatory bombings of North Vietnam after talks to end the war in Vietnam broke…
“How many people can you fit on a 747?”- Operations Sheba and Solomon
The Ethiopian Aliyah, as it is known in Israel, was the migration during the 1980’s of thousands of Ethiopian Jews…
Kimberley Process: Commercial Diplomacy to Stem the Flow of Blood Diamonds
During the 1990s, several African countries, namely Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia…
Seek and Destroy – The Mine Ban Treaty
Signed in Ottawa, Canada on December 3, 1997, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer…
“The Cold War Was Truly Over” — The 1986 Reykjavik Summit
After the 1985 Geneva Summit, where President Ronald Reagan and leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, met for the first…
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:…