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In the latest episode of the Explaining History Podcast, I explore the competing theories attempting to explain what is happening in the Persian Gulf – and what it tells us about the end of American hegemony. (photo credit: Gage Skidmore – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en) There are many competing theories about what we are seeing in the Gulf, and many different arguments about why America is doing what it is doing. These arguments fall into roughly two camps: the idea that there is an overarching grand plan behind everything that has happened since Venezuela in January, and – for my money – the…
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NATO’s foundational agreement is collapsing due to Trump’s actions, including threats to withdraw, humiliation of allies, and challenges to its mutual defense principles. Legal barriers exist to withdrawal, but trust in the U.S. security guarantee has eroded. If the U.S. falters, Europe would need heightened defense measures while Russia could be emboldened.
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The Question of Naming History has a way of naming things only after they have concluded. We look back at 1914 and 1939 as definitive starting points, but as we discuss in the latest Explaining History podcast, those living through the current conflagrations in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and Venezuela are left wondering: are we already in the midst of a global conflict? And if so, at what point do we give it a name? The historian Richard Overy, in his seminal work Blood and Ruins, suggests that the two World Wars might be viewed as a single, continuous struggle of…
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January 6, 2026 The statement issued today by twelve European leaders regarding the sovereignty of Greenland was brief, legalistic, and utterly devastating. By declaring Danish territory inviolable without explicitly naming the United States, Europe’s chancellories effectively acknowledged what historians and international relations theorists have whispered for a decade: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATONATO nato The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the military alliance of Western democracies founded in April 1949 to provide collective defence against Soviet expansion in Europe. The foundational principle — an attack on one member is an attack on all — created the security architecture that governed…
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For the past twenty years, the logic of American foreign policy in Asia has been simple: Build up India to box in China. Successive administrations, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden, pursued a policy of “strategic altruism.” They bent nuclear proliferation rules, shared cutting-edge technology, and looked the other way on trade disputes, all in the hope that a strong India would serve as a democratic bulwark in the Indo-Pacific. In 2025, that era came to a crashing halt. In this week’s podcast, I explored this dramatic shift, drawing on a provocative analysis by Chinese scholar Mao Keji titled Favorite…
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A New Defense Strategy Signals the End of ContainmentContainment The US foreign policy doctrine articulated by diplomat George Kennan in 1946–47, holding that Soviet expansion should be blocked at every point rather than directly confronted. It defined American grand strategy throughout the Cold War. The doctrine of containment emerged from Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ of February 1946 and his anonymous ‘X Article’ in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, which argued that Soviet expansion was not driven by genuine security needs but by ideological imperatives — that the Soviet state required external enemies to justify its domestic repression, and that it would…
