To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to…
To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power
What would it feel like To Run the World? The Soviet rulers spent the Cold War trying desperately to find out. In this panoramic new history of the conflict that defined the postwar era, Sergey Radchenko provides an unprecedented deep dive into the psychology of the Kremlin’s decision-making. He reveals how the Soviet struggle with the…
The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism during the Second World War
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, it set in motion a deadly struggle between the Axis powers and the Allies, but also fraught negotiations between and among the Allies. On questions of diplomacy, economic policy, industrial might, military capabilities, and even national sovereignty, thousands of lives and the fate of the free…
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence…
Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower
The dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation’s superpower status. In Dollars and Dominion, Mary Bridges tells a different origin story. She explores the ramshackle beginnings of US financial power overseas, showing that US bankers in the early twentieth century depended on the US government, European…
John Bew
John Bew has served in senior positions at the highest levels of the U.K. government, spending over five years as the chief Foreign Policy Advisor at 10 Downing Street, working for four prime ministers and through two general elections. He was the author of the last two U.K. national security strategies and intimately involved in the…
Nina Srinivasan Rathbun
Nina Srinivasan Rathbun is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She has taught courses on U.S. foreign policy, the European Union, communism and post-communism in Eastern Europe, research design and methods, global governance, globalization and global finance, receiving several USC Excellence in Teaching grants…