Kennan on NATO Expansion: “A Fateful Error”
Hi, In January 2022, I wrote and article titled: Notes on NATO Expansion where I highlighted the agreements made between U.S Secretary of State, James A. Baker, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. This is the famous “not one inch eastward” quote that gets mentioned every now and then. I’d like […]
Carter on Vietnam: “The Destruction Was Mutual”
The President’s News Conference, March 24, 1977 Ed Bradley [CBS News]: Q. Mr. President, on the subject of Vietnam, if you feel the United States is not obligated to uphold the terms of the Paris Peace Accords because of the North Vietnamese offensive that overthrew the South Vietnamese Government, do you feel, on the other […]
Downing Street Memo – Fixing the Facts on Iraq!
United Kingdom, Matthew Rycroft, Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Cabinet Minutes of Discussion, S 195/02, July 23, 2002 SOURCE: Printed in The Sunday Times, May 1, 2005 These notes offer insight into the attitude of the Bush administration toward regime change, the UN route, and propaganda efforts. The document contains the now-notorious statement in […]
Nayirah – U.S. Propaganda in the First Invasion of Iraq
We all know that the U.S. lied to the world in 2003 about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in addition to some bogus Saddam Hussein/Al-Qaeda link to justify their invasion of that country. But did you know that the U.S. also lied to the world for their first invasion of Iraq in 1991? Because, you […]
The Retrospective
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So welcome to our one final look back at the French Revolution before we finally move on. What I’m looking to do here, as much for myself as for you guys, is to walk back through everything that we’ve covered, to pull out what I consider to be the really […]
The Empire
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. Over the winter of 1804 and 1805, Emperor Napoleon I knew that come the spring, he was going to have to march out to prove to the world that he deserved the imperial crown he had just bestowed upon himself. And when the inevitable War of the Third Coalition started […]
The Consulate
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So a funny thing happened on my way to the finish line. On Friday morning my hard drive crashed. I didn’t lose any files, but I did lose an incredibly necessary day of work while my computer was being fixed. As a consequence, I had to abandon the dream of […]
There Is Your Man
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So we have somehow, amazingly, come to the end of the French Revolution. We’ve been at this together for 14 months, more than 50 episodes and over 250,000 words of transcript. But today, the Directory will be overthrown and Napoleon Bonaparte will come to power. There are lots of places […]
The Coup of Prairial
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. So this week marks the penultimate episode of our cycle on the French Revolution. It will take us through to the autumn of 1799 and set up the looming coup of Brumaire, that, out of some necessity, I am marking as the end of the line. After next week’s episode […]
The Second Coalition
Hello, and welcome to Revolutions. We spent all of last week with Napoleon in Egypt. This week we are going to double back and follow the developments in Europe while Napoleon’s army was trapped in the east. And as we will see in a moment, it was largely because Napoleon had gone east that things […]