Thirty years ago, in early December 1994, at a security summit in Budapest, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine signed a memorandum in which Kyiv agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons left on its territory after the collapse of the USSR. In exchange, the other signatories offered assurances to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine's territorial integrity or political independence. Events would prove the Budapest Memorandum to be worth less than the paper it was printed on. Thirty years later, Russia has invaded Ukraine and occupies much of its eastern reg ..read more

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for individual Israeli and Hamas leaders, charging them with crimes against humanity. The accusations against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant involve the intentional murder of Palestinian civilians and starvation as a method of war. Since invading Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children while utterly destroying most of Gaza's civilian infrastructure. Jewish settlers are said to be waiting to move ..read more

After the election, there was a hurricane of postmortems attempting to explain why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump. Eschewing small-bore analysis, historian Daniel Bessner posted on X, "I feel like people are missing the fundamental lesson of the election: it is not the Democratic Party that is in crisis; liberalism itself is in crisis." Liberalism—the dominant political philosophy of the American Century—appears to be a spent force amid a wave of illiberal populism and anti-establishment politics. In this episode, Bessner, who co-hosts American Prestige podcast, delves into the origins of ..read more

This episode was first published on March 4, 2024. Original show notes: The embattled incumbent expressed anguish over soulless materialism. The optimistic challenger promised Americans they could overcome any and all problems. The election of 1980 pitted Democrat Jimmy Carter against Republican Ronald Reagan as Americans struggled with stagflation at home and crises abroad. Reagan's victory marked a sea change in U.S. politics, tilting the political landscape to the right. Reagan crusaded against big government and Soviet Communism. If the incumbent looked impotent in the face of these vexing ..read more

This is the first of two episodes dealing with the consequences of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and ensuing year of war. A year after Israel began its military campaign in Gaza with the aim of destroying Hamas in retaliation for the 10/7 terrorist atrocities, the radical Islamist group survives. Hamas is weakened, but it maintains a brutal grip on power in Gaza. Hamas also continues to hold Israeli hostages who were kidnapped last October. Its leader Yahya Sinwar is believed to be hiding underground, his attitude hardening toward reaching a ceasefire with his lifelong enemy. In this ep ..read more

Over the centuries, Thanksgiving traditions have changed with political, cultural, and religious winds. The holiday's mythic origins were propagated in the mid-nineteenth century, and soon Americans were all celebrating Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. Parades and football games are important pieces of Americana now synonymous with Thanksgiving -- as is the start of the Christmas shopping season. In this episode, historian David Silverman delves into the history of a quintessential American holiday whose development has as much to do with magazine editor Sara Josepha Hale as th ..read more

Ronald Reagan was the most consequential U.S. president of the second half of the twentieth century. Conservatives once lionized him before the rise of Donald Trump. Yet how Reagan is remembered does not entirely square with his actual record. Although an anti-government, anti-Communist ideologue, Reagan governed like a pragmatist. Moreover, the fortieth president was a terrible manager with a flimsy grasp of policy. His administration was rife with scandal. When he left office, the federal deficit had nearly tripled. Despite it all, Reagan was an effective national leader who inspired America ..read more

Does the historical concept of oblivion offer a way out of our ruptured political life? "For centuries, legislative acts of oblivion were declared in times when betrayal, war, and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying, and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm, to further fracture already divided societies," writes the scholar Linda Kinstler. In this episode, Kinstler delves into the history of oblivion as well ..read more

The United States' most-wanted jihadist in Afghanistan is trying to portray himself as a pragmatic diplomat. Washington doesn't seem to be interested. Sirajuddin Haqqani has the blood of many U.S. soldiers and Afghan civilians on his hands. While the U.S. views him as an enemy, the CIA once handsomely supported his father Jalaluddin Haqqani in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s. The elder Haqqani was close to bin Laden in the years before the Haqqani network would violently resist U.S. invaders -- after the al-Qaeda strikes on 9/11/2001. Ah, Afghanistan, where the past is not even past ..read more

Donald Trump's election victory probably means Hitler comparisons won't go away, even if they make little sense. Still, there are lessons to learn from the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler was levered into power by conservative elites who wrongly assumed that they could control the "Bohemian corporal." The question is which lessons are the right lessons? In this episode, historian Christian Goeschel of the University of Manchester explains how Hitler achieved power in Germany to avoid facile comparisons to the America of 2024. Our problems today bear little r ..read more