Military history by country

President George W. Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast. But the war dragged on for many years after that.

Citizen pain: Part II

Critical State

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into how the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 not only dismantled the government but destroyed an entire nation, forcing a mass exodus of certain ethnic and religious minorities.

Hundreds of people, some holding documents, gather near an evacuation control checkpoint on the perimeter of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 27, 2021.

Afghanistan airlift continues after deadly suicide attacks

Top of The World
Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda speaks at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, in this this Aug. 28, 2018, file photo.

Israel has a stake in Biden administration’s decision to lift ICC sanctions

Justice
Houthi fighters hold images of relatives killed in violent conflict

Yemen’s most stable city threatened by Houthi takeover

Conflict & Justice
Allied forces building harbours in France.

D-Day succeeded thanks to an ingenious design called the Mulberry Harbors

Military

The French connection: New book provides sweeping history of Vietnam War

Arts, Culture & Media

The Vietnam War ranks among the most contentious events in American history. But few experts agree on the specifics of when and how it started. In a new book on the war, historian Frederik Logevall takes a look at the decades preceding American involvement to better understand the making of America’s Vietnam.

Complete Pentagon Papers released 40 years later

Global Politics

Exactly 40 years after being published in articles by the New York Times, the National Archives and Records Administration will release the full Pentagon Papers.

Cold War Linguists: The NSA’s Spies of Teufelsberg

The World in Words

The US once ran a Cold War listening station atop a man-made mountain in West Berlin. For the American linguists who worked at Teufelsberg, it provided a combination of excitement and boredom– and a great way to avoid serving in Vietnam.

The American Actor Vying to Play Napoleon at Waterloo

Conflict & Justice

Mark Schneider has been obsessed with Napoleon since he was a kid. Now, he’s in the running to play the famous French general at the 200th anniversary re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium.

Unwilling Witness: The Terror of Reporting on Your Own Country

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq.  Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi, who covered the war as a correspondent for The New York Times,  has mixed feelings about the consequences of the occupation of his native   country. Like many Iraqis, Al-Saiedi initially welcomed the war that brought an end to Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Especially […]