Why does a state last a thousand years? Why not 999? Why not a thousand and one? What are the events that finally bring the whole thing down? That is what I am asking.
The Taliban rose to power in 1996, vowing stability and an end to the violence raging across the country between warring mujahedeen factions, and to implement rule by Sharia law, or strict Islamic...
Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural...
When it comes to the separation of powers, the Constitution makes it look pretty simple: Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them and the judiciary adjudicates them. In reality, though,...
Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes...
Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.
In justice to human society it may perhaps be said of almost all the polities and civil institutions in the world, however imperfect, that they have been founded in and carried on with very...
If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West...
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated...
The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and...
You better take care of me Lord, if you don't you're gonna have me on your hands.
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter...
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is...
If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would...
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.