History As It Happens

As Ukraine prepares to launch its spring offensive to break the stalemate against the Russian invaders, it's unclear if Ukrainian forces will be able to reach Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which for centuries has been of vital strategic importance. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven, who spent three weeks in Ukraine reporting on public opinion toward the war, talks about Crimea's historical relevance to today's conflict. First taken by the Tsarist Empire in the late-18th century, the Soviets transferred Crimea to the Ukraine S.S.R. in 1954. More than a half century later, the Kremlin seized it back in the aftermath of the 2014 revolution that ousted a pro-Russia president from Kyiv. 

Fifty years ago the U.S. agreed to withdraw the last of its forces from Vietnam. After years of excruciating negotiations held as the combatants lost tens of  thousands of casualties, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were heralded by President Richard Nixon as "peace with honor." But everyone who signed the accords knew peace was not in the offing. Two years later, in late April 1975, Saigon fell to the Communists. In this episode, historian Carolyn Eisenberg of Hofstra University and peace-building expert Andrew Wells-Dang of the U.S. Institute of Peace reflect on the meaning of the Paris Accords and the restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam more than twenty years later. Is it possible to heal war's wounds?

Nearly 40 years before Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and falsely charged him with spying, the KGB did the same to Nicholas Daniloff, whose plight became an international incident. The Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report, Daniloff was nabbed in the summer of 1986 as the Reagan White House was negotiating the terms of the next nuclear arms summit with the Kremlin, to be held in Iceland. Reagan personally pleaded with Gorbachev to free the American journalist. Today, President Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin are hardly on speaking terms. What will it take to free Evan Gershkovich?

April is Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi. Since the Confederacy was created by secession with the aim of protecting human chattel slavery, one wonders what kind of heritage Mississippians are supposed to celebrate. Maybe Governor Tate Reeves' bland proclamation, which makes no mention of slavery, treason, or the ruin brought on by Confederate defeat, is less a statement about history than current politics. Americans are deeply divided across a range of issues, and many people view their own government as the enemy of freedom, an attitude that echoes in the words of Confederate leaders. Historian James Oakes discusses what the Confederacy was all about.

The 1990s began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s armies from Kuwait. As the world’s only superpower, the U.S. would intervene militarily – on humanitarian grounds – in countries most Americans knew little about: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo (but not Rwanda). President Clinton worked with Russian president Boris Yeltsin on establishing a stable U.S.-Russia relationship. China was welcomed into the world’s rules-based trading system. Democracy and capitalism appeared to be on the march. The decade ended with Russia’s economy in ruins and Vladimir Putin in charge of the Kremlin prosecuting a brutal war in Chechnya. In this episode, historian Michael Kimmage discusses the faulty assumptions that underpinned U.S. foreign policy during the pivotal decade between the Cold War and onset of the global war on terrorism. If the past 20 years of failed war-making and nation-building in the Greater Middle East are cause for reflection, the origins of this strategic drift may be found in the decade where U.S. leaders hoped to shape a “new world order.”

Few things in life, let alone politics, are truly unprecedented. When it comes to the American presidency, Donald Trump did make history as the first former chief executive to be charged with a crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg got a grand jury to indict Trump on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. Trump's case comes half a century after President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, preventing the latter from facing any legal consequences for the Watergate scandal. While Ford hoped to put the "long national nightmare" in the past, the pardon deprived the country of establishing any precedent for prosecuting rogue presidents. But no two cases will ever be the same, and in this episode, historian and Watergate chronicler Michael Dobbs discusses the major similarities and differences between then and now.

Historian Michael Kazin, a distinguished scholar of the American left, says American politics are caught in "the long 1960s." For decades Congress has been unable to pass sweeping measures desired by the progressive left to fundamentally reform American capitalism. They simply don’t have the votes. In fact, neither major party recently has dominated Congress the way, for instance, Democrats did during the New Deal era, with more than 70 seats in the Senate and a massive advantage in the House. Why a partisan stalemate has endured since the 1960s is a complicated problem to unpack, but the answer leads to today’s congressional math. Throughout U.S. history, very few periods of one-party dominance have occurred, periods where great legislative activity was possible.

Forty years ago, 'Return of the Jedi' opened in movie theaters, but 1983 also was a big year for another kind of 'Star Wars.' Two months before the movie premiered, President Ronald Reagan delivered a nationally televised address announcing an initiative to build a space-based missile shield that would use lasers to shoot down incoming ICBMs. Derisively dubbed "Star Wars" by skeptics -- skeptics who were right to doubt its feasibility -- Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative never amounted to anything useful. It was, however, part of Reagan's vision for a world free of nuclear weapons, a vision he successfully pursued in negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In this episode, Joseph Cirincione, an expert on nuclear non-proliferation and national defense, discusses how the world has moved a long way in the wrong direction from the "golden age" of nuclear arms reduction treaties. 

Former President Donald Trump held his first rally of the 2024 campaign near a special place in far-right mythology. Thirty years ago in Waco, Texas, federal agents lay siege to the Branch Davidian compound where charismatic religious leader David Koresh awaited the end of the world. In this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer contends Trump's choice of location was a deliberate move to stoke anti-government vibes among militias, white supremacists, sovereign citizens, and similar groups whose visibility dramatically grew during his presidency. Their ideas have bled into the mainstream of American political life, but their origins date to the 1970s -- mostly from the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest. Trump may be drawing a direct line from Waco to January 6 as a campaign motif. He ended his presidency by embracing political violence to attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and then used his first rally of the 2024 election cycle to glorify the people serving time for the attack on the Capitol.

One consequence of the United States’ massive military failures in the Greater Middle East is its waning influence in a region where U.S. leaders once dreamt democracy would spread outward from Kabul and Baghdad. As the U.S. presence and its credibility have shrunk, regional powers are looking elsewhere to resolve entrenched disputes. Enter Beijing. In this episode, the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi discusses a potential paradigm shift that's been decades in the making. Without firing a shot or taking sides – without any military presence at all in the Middle East – China helped broker a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that will restore diplomatic relations between the two nations. The U.S. has moved a long way in the wrong direction from the days of the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the Oslo Accords of 1993.