Cold War
Story Stream
When the C.I.A. Turned Writers Into Operatives May 22, 2024
Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist variety: he cooks up projects using his own zeal, research, and audacious notions, then unleashes the results on the world. “Theory...
The Kingdom of the ‘Planet of the Apes’ Evolves May 13, 2024
There may be no more astonishing image in the history of modern science-fiction cinema than the severed torso of the Statue of Liberty strewn on the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968): the torch that once welcomed the tired, poor, huddled m...
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 'Fallout' May 06, 2024
In terms of popular franchises that were ripe for adaptation, Fallout had to be one of the best candidates available. It’s an immensely popular video game series with a devoted fanbase, several bestselling games, and endless source material that a te...
Recognizing the Enemy Within May 06, 2024
Political intrigue, Communism, and an ongoing Cold War are the engaging backdrop contributing to the excellent story in John Frankenheimer’s film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film epitomizes the tense political atmosphere in the United State...
Milan Kundera’s Sexual Revolutions August 03, 2023
Mere days after Milan Kundera’s death in France at the age of 94, the ghost of the Czech-born novelist was spotted on the front lines of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Writing in the German weekly Die Zeit under the title “The Man Who Knew the Russians”, A...
Cloak and Swagger July 24, 2023
An undeniable, unpleasant, and intriguing truth: The Soviets were usually much better at espionage than either the Americans or the Brits. German fascists, who once upon a time also had a substantial fan club in the West and a ruthless police state a...
Chill in the East July 20, 2023
Excerpted from “Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West” by Calder Walton. Copyright (c) 2023. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.In October 1945, in the wake of the two atomic bombs dropped by the U...
How Much Do Intellectuals Matter? July 18, 2023
Some facts are so shocking that you don’t want to believe them. And if you do believe them, there’s a tendency to forget, downgrade their importance, and often have to be reminded of them again. Here’s one fact that falls into this category: The Amer...
How Kafka Achieved Cult Status in Cold War America July 10, 2023
Even though Franz Kafka had been dead since 1924, his writing would provide Cold War-era writers and intellectuals in the United States with a literary vocabulary for imagining life behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, a wave of new K...
Civilizations Clash June 28, 2023
Samuel Huntington got Ukraine wrong.That’s what a casual reader of “The Clash of Civilizations?“—published in Foreign Affairs 30 years ago this summer—might think.Huntington was at the peak of his career as a political science professor and director ...
Don DeLillo’s Cold Wars June 28, 2023
An assassin works from a partial understanding of the world. If not literally a hashishi, as suggested by the word’s etymology, an assassin must nevertheless see the world in tunnel vision, his victim viewed through the lens of a scope. The vast, com...
Don DeLillo’s Cold Wars June 27, 2023
An assassin works from a partial understanding of the world. If not literally a hashishi, as suggested by the word’s etymology, an assassin must nevertheless see the world in tunnel vision, his victim viewed through the lens of a scope. The vast, com...
Jeffrey Sachs, Elite Apostate June 20, 2023
Last month, the economist Jeffrey Sachs appeared on the Substack podcast Nonzero, hosted by the writer Robert Wright, to discuss American foreign policy failures in the post-Cold War world. Wright asked Sachs if he felt American journalism is in decl...
Choosing Defeat June 01, 2023
Writing five years ago in the Claremont Review of Books (“The Vietnam War Revisited,” Spring 2018), I criticized a ten-part PBS series, The Vietnam War (2017) by directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, arguing that, rather than an evenhanded examination...
The Discontents of Francis Fukuyama April 18, 2023
The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a better world. After four decades of struggle, the great battle between liberalism and Bolshevism had ended in the former’s decisive victory. Many in the West hoped that liberalism would now have free...
Robert Trivers, Stalin, and the Dark Side of Idealism April 12, 2023
Over a lifetime, one can at best hope to achieve a very selective understanding of history. No matter how smart and well-read you are, even if you devote your life to the field, there will always remain huge gaps in your knowledge. There will be enti...
Correcting the Course March 10, 2023
he end of the Cold War three decades ago followed by the terror attacks in 2001 should have ushered in an era of consensus and bipartisan agreement in the United States. That was what people expected at the time, but it was not what happened. Far fro...
Correcting the Course March 09, 2023
The end of the Cold War three decades ago followed by the terror attacks in 2001 should have ushered in an era of consensus and bipartisan agreement in the United States. That was what people expected at the time, but it was not what happened. Far fr...
The Old Master Goes Home March 08, 2023
Theodor Adorno said that when it comes to the paintings of Old Masters that their late works are catastrophes. The old works’ maturity, he wrote, “does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are for the most part not round, but furrowed, even...
Beyond the Rainbow March 01, 2023
To describe any novel is to do it a disservice, and in some cases, you shouldn’t even bother. Thus, having failed on numerous occasions to describe Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s colossal, parabolic wonderland of a novel, I’ve simply stopped try...
Refighting the Vietnam War March 01, 2023
Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should...
The Liberal Internationalist February 22, 2023
A fine new book argues that the contemporary Left could learn a lot from the life and work of the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens.British-American journalist, essayist, author, and human bulldozer Christopher Hitchens intimidated nearly everyone...
We’re All Living Under Gravity’s Rainbow February 20, 2023
February 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Gravity’s Rainbow. A controversial literary sensation when it was published—it was infamously snubbed by Pulitzer higher-ups, despite unanimous recommendation from the fiction jury—the novel has since gathe...
Erudite Conservativism February 16, 2023
Dan Mahoney’s latest book brings together two of the preeminent liberal conservative thinkers of the post–Cold War era. Coming of the intellectual age during the Cold War, the grim possibility of dictatorship is never far from the surface in the copi...
Reagan's Negotiated Peace January 06, 2023
William Inboden’s new book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is a masterful account of the most significant American foreign policy success of the 20th century—the orchestrated demise of the Soviet Union and the...
