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…
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 –…
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…
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 Panama Riots of 1964: The Beginning of the End for the Canal
When President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty with Panama in 1903, the United States gained sovereignty over the portion…