Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

Woodrow Wilson

The Power of Broken Promises: Wilson’s Fourteen Points and U.S.-Arab Relations

The Power of Broken Promises: Wilson’s Fourteen Points and U.S.-Arab Relations

Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech is popularly understood to have improved the United States’ standing among Arab nations. His words offered hope for a better political future in the new world order. Wilson’s rhetoric, however, ultimately proved detrimental to the Arab view of the United States. By raising Arab expectations for national sovereignty Wilson’s Fourteen Points invited a moral taint on the U.S. in the eyes of Arab nationalists. This taint exacerbated the strain on U.S.-Arab relations that would follow the creation of the Israeli state.

#Reviewing A Burden Too Great to Bear

#Reviewing A Burden Too Great to Bear

Our historical image of Woodrow Wilson reflects this tendency. We label individuals and ideas as “Wilsonian” if they exhibit a utopian vision of the world as it should be based on a set of moral ideas that, often times, appear quaint or naive. Rarely in the twenty-first century do we believe that being “Wilsonian” is a good thing, though many argue that neoconservatives and liberal interventionists both share principles borrowed from the twenty-eighth president. Our vision of Wilson, top hat on head and moralistic 14 Points in his coat pocket, being hailed by the war-fatigued European countries, must be bookended by his return to America, hat now in hand, begging the nation to approve the League of Nations. In this way, his failure and his series of strokes conveniently play out as a Grecian tragedy with an American chorus passing judgment on a president consumed with hubris.