By Steve Leonard, Modern War Institute: “After nearly two decades of war, most of us can point to that defining moment, when clarity shone through the fog of war for a brief instant, forever frozen in time.”
The Trap of Empire and Authoritarianism
By Robert D. Kaplan, The National Interest: “For thousands of years the tragedy of politics has been that empire affords the answer to chaos. Imperialism, as the Oxford historian John Darwin says, “has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history,” as the capabilities needed to build strong states, owing to the patterns of geography, were never evenly distributed, so that one ethnic group usually emerged to rule the territory of others.”