Tag: Senate Foreign Relations Committee
When Freud Put Woodrow Wilson on the Couch
Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.
From the distance of the present, it’s almost impossible to imagine that
Taiwan Wants China to Think Twice About an Invasion
Taiwan’s presidential offices are located in a sprawling, stately complex built by the Japanese colonial administration in the early 20th century—a reminder that, for all the belligerent rhetoric coming from the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan has not been firmly under Beijing’s control for well over 100 years. When I arrived at the offices in September for an interview with President Tsai Ing-wen, it occurred to me that the large tower rising above the entrance might become a target in the
When Biden Went to China
On April 19, 1979, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware was in Beijing, meeting with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, when he put Washington’s nascent friendship with the Communists to the test.
That Biden was sitting there at all was remarkable. The United States and China had been implacable foes for decades. In Washington, Deng and his cadres were seen as a dangerous arm of the Red menace, their conquest of China 30 years earlier bitterly lamented as its “loss” to
The West Should Stop Doing Global Kleptocrats So Many Favors
All of us have in our mind a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups,