The Democracy Perception Index 2026 is a global survey covering over ninety percent of the world’s population. It has produced results that confound nearly every assumption underlying the Western foreign-policy consensus. The United States, self-declared champion of...
Adam Hochschild’s masterpiece King Leopold’s Ghost reconstructs one of the largest and least remembered mass atrocities of the modern era and exposes how Belgium’s liberal monarchy built a slave state in the Congo, which killed millions. First published in 1999 and...
The modern international order rests on a contradiction rarely examined in full daylight. Western states present themselves as guardians of international rules, democracy, and self-determination, yet the historical record of their behavior abroad tells a different...
In the Western imagination, Taiwan is cast almost exclusively as a flourishing democracy under siege by a totalitarian neighbor, a moral clarity that fuels calls for military defense and ideological solidarity. Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s magisterial new history, The...
The collapse of Venezuela is often narrated in the West as a simple morality play – a cautionary tale of socialist overreach and the inevitable rot of authoritarianism. Francisco Rodríguez’s “The Collapse of Venezuela” dismantles this caricature, showing with...
The history of Venezuela is often reduced to a cautionary tale of a single charismatic leader or a sudden economic collapse, yet the reality is a far more harrowing chronicle of structural extraction and imperial oversight. For over a century, the nation has served as...
Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi’s 2023 book Dying by the Sword is both a work of scholarship and an unflinching indictment. It demolishes the enduring myth of the United States as a hesitant warrior, reluctantly drawn into conflicts by others. Instead, using their...
Scott Horton’s masterpiece “Enough Already” shows how the U.S. and its allies spread devastation through Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan, propping up despots and arming extremists along the way. The final balance sheet: two million dead,...
Paul Chamberlin’s masterful new book, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II, is a vitally important work that fundamentally reframes our understanding of the twentieth century’s most devastating conflict. It meticulously dismantles the comfortable and...
In Why America Can't Retrench (And How It Might), Peter Harris suggests that America’s worldwide posture is less a strategic choice than a default ingrained in its DNA, where an imperial presidency, a sprawling military-industrial complex, and a political culture...
