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In this book, Michael Kimmage, a historian and former State Department official who focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offers a wide-angle, historically informed account of the origins of the current Russia-Ukraine war. Tracing the development of Ukraine and Russia's fractious relationship back to the end of the Cold War, Kimmage takes readers through the central events that led to Vladimir Putin seizing a large portion of Ukraine – the Crimea – in 2014 and, eight years later, initiating arguably the most intensive military conflict of the entire post-World War II era. From the halls of power in Washington, Kyiv, and Moscow to the battlefields of Ukraine, Kimmage chronicles Putin's ascendancy to the Russian presidency, delves into multiple American presidencies and their dealings with Russia and Europe, and recounts Europe's efforts to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union. He tells the story of how Ukraine went from an embattled country on the edge of Europe to a formidable military power capable of pushing back the Russian military. Just as importantly, Kimmage captures how the current war has transformed multiple centers of power – from China to the United States – and dramatically altered the path of globalization itself. He makes the case that the war in Ukraine has shifted the direction of major macro-trends in world politics, contributing to the fragmentation of international politics, higher inflation, greater food insecurity, and the general collapse of arms control. These intersecting dangers amount to a new age of global instability, born in war and in the collision between Russia and the United States that has brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War. An authoritative interpretation of possibly the most important geopolitical event of the post-Cold War era, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this epochal conflict and its ripple effects across the globe.

Throughout the twentieth century, many Americans saw themselves as part of Western civilization, and Western ideals of liberty and self-government guided American diplomacy. But today, other ideas fill this role: on one side, a technocratic "liberal international order," and on the other, the illiberal nationalism of "America First." In The Abandonment of the West, historian Michael Kimmage shows how the West became the dominant idea in US foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century - and how that consensus has unraveled. We must revive the West, he argues, to counter authoritarian challenges from Russia and China. This is an urgent portrait of modern America's complicated origins, its emergence as a superpower, and the crossroads at which it now stands.

While the center of economic gravity has already moved to Asia, Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine has reaffirmed Europe's role as the center stage of international affairs. (IPQ)

This essay focuses on chapter 30 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, one of the novel's shortest chapters. It contrasts bigness, destiny and Captain Ahab's authoritarian abuse of power with smallness, free will, and digression, the democratic virtues portrayed in Moby-Dick mostly through their absence but also, in chapter 30, by their presence in the form of a pipe that Captain Ahab smokes on deck and is then compelled to toss overboard so that The Pequod might complete is star-crossed and disastrously foreshadowed voyage. ; http://www.asjournal.org/69-2020/on-democracy-of-digression/

Francis Fukuyama said good-bye to the neo-conservatives due to the arguments about US foreign policy. In retrospect, he tells, not without sympathy, the history of the neo-conservative school of thought & makes proposals of how their freedom loving legacy could be used for a new, multilaterally oriented foreign policy. Adapted from the source document.

The Middle of the Journey (1947) contains the ideological
dilemmas out of which the neo- conservative movement would grow in
the 1970s. The origins of this movement lie in the novel's subject,
the break with communism. Trilling was himself Jewish, as were many
neo-conservative intellectuals, but his novel is conspicuous for its lack
of Jewish characters. The novel's ideological content helps to explain
this. Trilling made a stark separation between religious conservatism and
the secular liberalism to which he personally adhered. He foresaw the ways
in which anti-communism would legitimate both liberalism and conservatism,
yet his novel offered no room for its characters fo synthesize ethnicity
or religion with involvement in the modern world. The absence of Jewish
characters allowed Trilling to explore a liberalism uncomplicated
by religion or ethnicity. Jewish neo- conservatives perpetuated the
anti-communist world of Trilling in 1947, but they dis covered within
it the possibility of being Jewish, conservative, and modern; hence the
com plexity of Trilling's relationship to them.