History
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The late February dustup in the oval office between team Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky was certainly entertaining political drama. Strip away the vituperative rancor, however, and the exchange also offered a fascinating exhibition of some of the key elements that influence a nation’s ability to successfully operate in the international arena. Let’s start with…
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An incoming U.S. presidential administration is traditionally afforded one hundred days to plot the trajectory of its policies. With Trump 2.0, that conventional timeline has been shattered. In his first three weeks in office, the new president has careened from crisis to crisis like an energy drink-addled adolescent in a turbo-charged bumper car, stopping only…
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While some of you probably will not find this of interest, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based foreign policy think tank, has published another article of mine on the Czech Republic. The quick summary is that as parliamentary elections await in the second half of 2025 the country runs the risk of joining Hungary…
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Thirty-five years ago the iron curtain collapsed. So ended a brief but tragic period in the European story first defined by Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech; “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” As communist regimes fell from Budapest to Berlin to Prague…
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One year ago on 7 October 2023 Hamas, the militant terrorist group/governing authority of the Gaza strip, launched a lightning assault on Jewish communities across the border in Israel. The bloodletting resulted in nearly 1200 dead on the Israeli side with another 252 hostages seized in the strike and brought back to Gaza. The ramifications…
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Fifty years ago this month Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace as President of the United States, before likely being impeached in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The corruption at the highest level of the American government contributed to a nascent loss of trust by a significant portion of the populace in their elected leaders,…
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This is the third article in a series on key foreign policy challenges for the next U.S. president. The series will continue between now and the elections on 5 November. In his influential 1992 work – The End of History and the Last Man, on the logical progression of social and governmental structures to the…
Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog 