On April 24, 1980, eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters took off from the USS Nimitz, an American aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. Thus began Operation EAGLE CLAW, which aimed to rescue the fifty-two American diplomats and expatriates held hostage … Continue reading
Benjamin V. Allison
The Soviet-Afghan War at Forty: The “Shocks of ‘79” and the Coming of the Second Cold War
In the early morning hours of Christmas Day 1979, Soviet forces began invading Afghanistan. The international community was shocked by the intervention; even though Afghanistan had been unstable for some time, most assumed that the Soviet Union would stick to … Continue reading
Killing Baghdadi Does Not Equal Defeating ISIS
On the night of October 26–27, around 50 soldiers of Delta Force entered Idlib, Syria via helicopter, where they cornered Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State (IS), in a tunnel under his compound. Baghdadi detonated the … Continue reading
Hope Springs Eternal: Forty Years of Egyptian-Israeli Peace
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. Historians consider the Egyptian-Israeli peace brokered by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s to be the most important and impressive diplomatic achievement of an administration otherwise plagued by foreign … Continue reading
The Endless Summer: The Democrats’ Hellish Summer of 1968
The summer of 1968 was an absolute nightmare for the Democratic Party. Everything that could go wrong, did, and there was precious little the Democrats could do to avoid or even anticipate it. Summer is typically the time when American … Continue reading
Biting the Bullet: LBJ’s “Withdrawal Speech,” Fifty Years Later
On the night of Sunday, March 31, 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson began one of the most famous addresses of his long career. “Good evening, my fellow Americans: Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast … Continue reading