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In the mid-1960s, the United States was governed by what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the “Vital Center”—a liberal consensus that believed in the New Deal at home and the containment of communism abroad. Yet, by 1968, this center had collapsed, assailed not just by the conservative right, but by a ferocious “New Left” that viewed liberalism as morally bankrupt.
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Is the era of Western global dominance coming to an end? This episode explores the profound decline of Western, and particularly American, “hard” and “soft” power on the world stage.We begin by contrasting two pivotal moments in history: Lord Palmerston’s 19th-century Britain, which could blockade a nation over the dubious claims of a single subject, and the modern United States, a superpower unable to prevent a small city-state like Singapore from punishing one of its citizens. This shift illus
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Explaining History Podcast: 2025 in Review – The Year the Tech War Was LostAs 2025 draws to a close, we reflect on a pivotal year that historians may one day see as the moment the world changed forever. This episode delves into the most significant geopolitical shift of our time: the American retreat from its tech and trade war with China, and the quiet acknowledgment that the battle has been lost.Join us as we analyze the key indicators of this tipping point, from tech oligarch Peter Thiel losi
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In the late 1940s and early 1950s some of the most extreme anti communist laws were passed at state level, including the death penalty for membership of any seditious organisation and the compulsory registration of subversive parties. None of this legislation was ever actually enacted and much of it was declared unconstitutional by federal judges and counteracted by federal legislation, but it gives us a valuable snapshot of the climate of hysteria and dread in America at the time. Newsflash: Yo
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A seismic shift in US global strategy appears to be confirmed. In this explosive episode, we dissect the leaked draft of the Pentagon’s latest National Defense Strategy, which signals a historic reversal of decades of American foreign policy.We delve into the news that the US is formally de-prioritizing the “deterrence of China” in favor of a new focus on the homeland and the Western Hemisphere. What makes this shift so remarkable is its author: Elbridge Colby, the renowned strategist and author
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In 1940, when France fell to the Nazi invasion its colonies became Vichy satellites and in Asia, Vietnam rapidly fell under Japanese control. The French colonial elites saw their power gradually stripped away from them but it was the Vietnamese people that suffered terribly from Japanese rule with over a million dying in a famine created by the occupiers. The American OSS shipped arms to the Vietminh, the national liberation movement, but by 1945 they were far more concerned about the returning
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In this episode of Explaining History, we explore the fraught world of war reporting in Vietnam during the decade before full-scale U.S. involvement. Drawing on Philip Knightley’s classic study The First Casualty, we examine how embedded American correspondents were constrained by censorship, official manipulation, and the Pentagon’s control over information. We also highlight the surprising advantage held by some British reporters, who—operating outside the U.S. military’s embedded framework—we
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In this episode, I read from Pankaj Mishra’s Bland Fanatics, a searing critique of liberalism and its reception beyond the West. Mishra explores how, across much of the Global South, liberalism is not the triumphant, self-evident good it is often assumed to be in Euro-American discourse, but instead a system bound up with histories of empire, inequality, and cultural dislocation. Through his lens, we examine why the liberal ideal — so celebrated in Western political thought — can appear hollow,
