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Category: History

Imperialist posturing by the United States has always spurred resistance from its southern neighbors

Imperialist posturing by the United States has always spurred resistance from its southern neighbors

Antonio De Loera-Brust writes: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s public threats to retake the Panama Canal, by force if necessary, have already done meaningful damage to U.S. standing in Latin America. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino responded immediately: no way. Other Latin American states, including Mexico, Chile, and Colombia, were quick to offer their solidarity to Panama. United States began building the Panama Canal during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who once advised, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump…

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Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark — and Europe

Trump triggers a crisis in Denmark — and Europe

Anne Applebaum writes: What did Donald Trump say over the phone to Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, on Wednesday? I don’t know which precise words he used, but I witnessed their impact. I arrived in Copenhagen the day after the call—the subject, of course, was the future of Greenland, which Denmark owns and which Trump wants—and discovered that appointments I had with Danish politicians were suddenly in danger of being canceled. Amid Frederiksen’s emergency meeting with business leaders, her…

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Panama Canal: Remembering the workers who died in the service of presidential ambitions

Panama Canal: Remembering the workers who died in the service of presidential ambitions

BREAKING: President Donald Trump declares the U.S. is "taking back" the Panama Canal from Chinese control pic.twitter.com/lqrKSgXzSK — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 20, 2025 President Trump: President McKinley made our country very rich, through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal, which has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States. The United States — I…

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Trump’s threats against Canada, Greenland, and Panama, vis-à-vis the Rio Treaty security pact

Trump’s threats against Canada, Greenland, and Panama, vis-à-vis the Rio Treaty security pact

Francisco Lobo writes: President-elect Donald Trump’s recent statements about his administration’s foreign policy toward Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal has given rise to international consternation. In particular, his statements about annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal – the first in his words by the “use of economic force,” the remaining two with the possibility of military force explicitly on the table– have been sufficiently worrisome to inspire foreign leaders to respond. What’s been missing from the commentary and analysis is a regional treaty,…

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Russia’s crisis of depopulation is at the heart of Putin’s paranoia

Russia’s crisis of depopulation is at the heart of Putin’s paranoia

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes write: We live in a strange time marked by widespread and ongoing depopulation. The entire world is grappling with a crisis of childlessness. By 2015, the global fertility rate had dropped to half of what it was in 1965, and most people now lives in societies with fertility rates below replacement levels. Populations are shrinking across rich and poor nations, secular and religious societies, democracies and autocracies alike. As the eminent American demographer Nicholas Eberstadt…

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20 years before Jan. 6, Al Gore stood up to his own party. Mike Pence was watching

20 years before Jan. 6, Al Gore stood up to his own party. Mike Pence was watching

Michael Kruse writes: Last summer, in a private moment at the memorial service for ex-senator Joe Lieberman at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, two former vice presidents had a conversation. Al Gore thanked Mike Pence, according to people close to both men, in an interaction that’s never been reported, for his actions at the Capitol the day it was attacked by a mob. Pence, on the opposite side of the political aisle but in the same set of pews, said something…

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History’s lessons on anti-immigrant extremism

History’s lessons on anti-immigrant extremism

Michael Luo writes: President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to begin enacting the anti-immigrant agenda at the center of his campaign the moment he takes office: mass deportations, a crackdown on people “pouring up through Mexico and other places,” even the elimination of birthright citizenship. (The fate of high-skill immigration is one area of uncertainty; a dispute over H-1B visas consumed maga world over the holidays.) The scale of what Trump has promised is difficult to fathom and without recent precedent….

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How the Democrats lost the working class

How the Democrats lost the working class

Jonathan Weisman writes: Democrats had just absorbed a crushing defeat in the 1994 midterm elections when President Bill Clinton’s very liberal labor secretary, Robert Reich, ventured into hostile territory to issue a prophetic warning. Struggling workers were becoming “an anxious class,” he told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, two weeks after Republicans led by Newt Gingrich had gained 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Society was separating into two tiers, Mr. Reich said, with “a few…

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Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change

Why liberals struggle to cope with epochal change

Ivan Krastev writes: As I witnessed the despair and incomprehension of liberals worldwide after Donald Trump’s victory in November’s U.S. presidential election, I had a sinking feeling that I had been through this before. The moment took me back to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, signaling the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism and the lifting of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since the end of World War II. The difference was that the world…

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Jimmy Carter might have saved the climate, if the country had let him try

Jimmy Carter might have saved the climate, if the country had let him try

Dave Levitan writes: It’s an old and well-worn story, of course. On June 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter stood in front of 32 newly installed solar panels on the White House roof, and announced a set of recommendations he sent to Congress regarding a grand new solar strategy. “Today, in directly harnessing the power of the Sun, we’re taking the energy that God gave us, the most renewable energy that we will ever see, and using it to replace our…

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An archeological revolution is transforming our image of human freedoms

An archeological revolution is transforming our image of human freedoms

David Wengrow writes: Contemporary historians tell us that, by the start of the Common Era, approximately three-quarters of the world’s population were living in just four empires (we’ve all heard of the Romans and the Han; fewer of us, perhaps, of the Parthians and Kushans). Just think about this for a minute. If true, then it means that the great majority of people who ever existed were born, lived and died under imperial rule. Such claims are hardly original, but…

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Jimmy Carter elevated human rights above Realpolitik

Jimmy Carter elevated human rights above Realpolitik

Daniel Fried writes: Official Washington and most of US academia regarded the Soviet Bloc­­—communist-dominated Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea east of West Germany—as permanent and, though this was seldom made explicit, stabilizing. Talk of “liberating” those countries was regarded as illusion, delusion, or cant. Maintaining US-Soviet stability, under this view of Cold War realism, required accepting Europe’s realities, as these were then seen. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Final Act of Helsinki, a sort…

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How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

How Native Americans guarded their societies against tyranny

A purple and white flag representing the world’s oldest democracy, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, flies above a Mohawk flag at a Native American gathering. Giordanno Brumas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill When the founders of the United States designed the Constitution, they were learning from history that democracy was likely to fail – to find someone who would fool the people into giving him complete power and then end the democracy. They…

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The birth of Jesus would probably have been forgotten – if it wasn’t for a plague

The birth of Jesus would probably have been forgotten – if it wasn’t for a plague

Jonathan Kennedy writes: In our Christmas imagery, ancient symbols such as fir trees, mistletoe, holly and ivy sit alongside the baby Jesus, Virgin Mary, angels and shepherds. This mixture of pagan and Christian traditions reminds us that Christmas was superimposed on to much older midwinter festivities. Yet had it not been for a devastating pandemic that swept through the Roman empire in the third century AD, the birth of Jesus would probably not feature at all in our winter solstice…

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The art of outlasting: What we can learn from time-proof Japanese businesses

The art of outlasting: What we can learn from time-proof Japanese businesses

Eric Markowitz writes: Picture yourself on a train hurtling toward Nara Prefecture, hours away from the neon-lit frenzy of Tokyo. The urban sprawl gives way to quieter vistas, the journey itself a pilgrimage of sorts. By the time you arrive in Ikaruga, at Hōryū-ji — widely considered one of the world’s oldest wooden temples — the modern world feels like a distant memory. The temple, originally commissioned by Prince Shōtoku in the 7th century, stands as a living testament to…

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A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

A CEO’s killing echoes the political violence of the Gilded Age

Zeynep Tufekci writes: I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder [that of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson] in this country has been so openly celebrated. The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication…

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