Beyond

USAID started in the 1960s as a way to offset the spread of communism. Since then, it has had various other soft-power benefits for the US.

On February 26, 1775, residents of Salem, Massachusetts, banded together to force the British to withdraw from their town in Leslie’s Retreat.

As a child in postings around the world, the author witnessed the agency’s complex relationship with American empire—and with autocrats everywhere.

If world leaders had been clearer about the sanctions Putin would face, they might have deterred his invasion of Ukraine.

How the country’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Elon Musk and other tech moguls with roots in apartheid-era South Africa have been shaped by the history of right-wing white nationalism.

Washington’s policy-makers showed themselves more wicked and feckless than their Vietnam- and Iraq-era predecessors.

The legacy of Nixon's strategic ambiguity of acknowledging China's claim to Taiwan without fully committing.

Although the West has long tolerated forced expulsions when convenient, its postwar framework at least nominally rejected them. Now the US is endorsing it.

For decades, Washington has denied, downplayed and rationalized atrocities by its allies.

Musk and Trump are capitalizing on decades of confusion and broken promises to lay waste to a crucial agency.

The president says he wants to be peacemaker—but his heroes were warmongers.

Though it may seem like a new topic of concern, the glaciated landscape of Greenland has floated in and out of American politics for decades.

There are better models for President Trump than William McKinley. 

Newly declassified documents reveal how Israel operated under the noses of U.S. inspectors.

Instead of compelling Canada to become an American state, the 1890 McKinley Tariff drove Canada into British hands.

King George and George Washington, featured in an upcoming exhibit.

During the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists embarked on an unprecedented quest to contact extraterrestrials.

Trump is freezing the United States’ foreign aid agency, which grew from our relief efforts over the world’s wars and crises.

Attempts to add Canada to the U.S. have gone poorly since the 1770s. Trump's rhetoric threatens a repeat.

How America’s search for total security keeps making the world more dangerous.

Kissinger warned: “This is no issue to face the world on. It looks like pure colonialism.”

The left case for an independent Canada.

How an erroneous 18th-century story about the “Caucasian race” led to a centuries of prejudice and misapprehension.

A new book traces the rise of the Israel lobby and the challenges it has faced as global criticism of Israel has intensified.

It made itself bigger.

He's not the first to set his sights on the island.

The uproar over Trump’s remarks about the Canal recalls a lively debate from the late 1970s.

The president who built his fan base on isolationism is pivoting to a kind of imperialism that the U.S. hasn’t seen in decades.

By threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal, Trump is evoking false stories about U.S. beneficence.