In Madden’s historically linked world, the defeat of Carthage in 204 B.C. is the mirror image of the D-Day invasion of World war II. The contempt the Greeks had for Romans even after Rome saved them from civil war is a historical analog to the Europeans’ anti-Americanism and arrogance even after the American military bailed [...]

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An inside look at the Russian leader’s autocratic regime and his turn away from the West
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity [...]

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It’s true China is booming, Russia is growing more assertive, terrorism is a threat. But if America is losing the ability to dictate to this new world, it has not lost the ability to lead. American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. [...]

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An indispensable account of how the world’s diminishing sources of energy are radically changing the international balance of power
Recently, an unprecedented Chinese attempt to acquire the major American energy firm Unocal was blocked by Congress amidst hysterical warnings of a Communist threat. But the political grandstanding missed a larger point: the takeover bid was a [...]

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Why nations are suddenly locked in an arms race unseen since the early days of the Cold War
But the exercise highlighted an alarming new reality. With much less fanfare than the early days of the Cold War, the world is entering a new arms race, and with it, a dangerous new web of military relationships. [...]

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Now, a young, well-traveled, multilingual foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khanna, suggests in “The Second World” that we are on the cusp of a new new world order — “a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.” The three are the United States, the European Union and China. The [...]

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By the third week of January this year, we heard Russia announce that it would not hesitate to be the first to use nuclear weapons in battle, that it would resume this May parading tanks and missiles through Red Square in the Soviet fashion, that it would reestablish the application of double jeopardy in criminal [...]

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From an isolationist nation at the end of World war One, the US today has bases in over ninety countries. No other nation has been able to project military power as the US does today. But is such an involvement sustainable? Despite its might, the US is shrinking in terms of population and economic power [...]

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