Stay ConnectedDiscover how the past shapes the present with the best historians in the world. Everything happening today comes from something, somewhere. History As It Happens features interviews with today’s top scholars and thinkers, interwoven with audio from history’s archive.
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When do empires decline and why? Today, the United States is stuck in another unwinnable war in the Persian Gulf, its military and economic might insufficient to force Iran's surrender. This humiliation is part of a pattern: the U.S. fights many wars but wins few. Washington's security commitments sprawl the globe, yet where the U.S. chooses to intervene, legitimate national security interests are often not on the line.
The Iran war disaster has exposed the limits of power, a case of overstretch that historians may compare to past empires that accelerated their own declines. Historian Jeffrey Engel is our guest.
Jeffrey Engel teaches at Southern Methodist University, where he is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History. He's the author of When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.
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Are the NATO allies in Eastern Europe risking war with Russia over a piece of Russian national territory wedged between Lithuania and Poland? Russia has warned NATO it is prepared to use its entire arsenal, including nuclear weapons, if the Western alliance attempts to cut off the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.
Once part of East Prussia and home to the beautiful German city of Königsberg, the Soviet Union annexed the territory after WWII, renamed it Kaliningrad, and it was settled by Russians after the German population was expelled. A Soviet strategic foothold on the Baltic Sea, Kaliningrad would be surrounded by the NATO allies after 1991, setting the stage for today's dangerous tensions. Anatol Lieven is our guest.
Anatol Lieven is the director of the Eurasia Program and the Andrew Bacevich Chair in American Diplomatic History at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Further reading:
Slouching Toward Kaliningrad by Anatol Lieven for Responsible Statecraft
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The story of how and why the Biden administration enabled Israel’s genocidal brutality in Gaza and beyond has been written by the journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, revealing the callousness and incompetence of an enfeebled president and his top aides, who exercised a default deference to Israel — in defiance of U.S. and international law — after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Biden team's failure to restrain Israel from committing mass murder will shadow them for the rest of their lives, as the consequences ripple across a Middle East upended by war and genocide.
Recommended reading:
Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed
Biden's Israel Catastrophe by Martin Di Caro (The American Conservative)
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40 Octobers ago, the superpowers' leaders met in a distant capital and came within a whisker of agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The Reykjavík summit ended without a breakthrough, but it was not a failure. Soon the world would witness the high tide of arms control treaties and superpower detente.
However, that time is long over. In our age of budget-busting nuclear modernization and potential proliferation, superpower hostility and anarchy are the norms. Where’s the spirit of Reagan, Gorbachev, and Reykjavík? Our guest is historian Michael Kimmage.
Michael Kimmage is the director of the Kennan Institute in Washington, an expert on the Cold War and U.S.-Russia relations. He's the author of 'Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.'
Further reading:
Reykjavik at 40 by Martin Di Caro (Responsible Statecraft)
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The Cold War began about 80 years ago. It ended more than 35 years ago, leading to triumphalist attitudes in the West. Who started it? Who really "won"? Why are we still debating this? Because Cold War history continues to shape our world — and our minds. Our guests are historians Daniel Bessner and Vladislav Zubok.
Bessner teaches history at the University of Washington. He’s the co-host of American Prestige and the co-editor, with Michael Brenes, of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency.
Vladislav Zubok is an eminent historian of international relations at the London School of Economics and the author of The World of the Cold War, 1945 to 1991.
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On Tuesday, Oct. 27, Israelis will vote in what some consider the most consequential election in the country's history.
It is the first election since Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas onslaught in southern Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu, 77, hopes to remain in power despite having been indicted for war crimes by the ICC. In this episode, Israeli political scientist and leading pollster Dahlia Scheindlin discusses the country's mood and which parties are best positioned to form a new government.
Further reading:
Explained: How can Israelis still vote for Netanyahu? by Dahlia Scheindlin (Haaretz)
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As inflation fuels a cost-of-living crisis, millions of Americans are getting a bitter taste of what past generations dealt with. From the mid-1960s into the Age of Reagan, high inflation (or stagflation) bedeviled economists, frustrated presidents, and shrank the horizons of middle-class Americans. And not just inflation! Policy-makers' responses also caused pain. In this episode, historian Nelson Lichtenstein delves into inflation's historical causes and pokes holes in the conventional wisdom that interest rate adjustments by an independent Federal Reserve are the wisest way to tame inflation.
Nelson Lichtenstein teaches labor and economic history at U.C. Santa Barbara. He's the author of Why Labor Unions Matter (2026).
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When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, the United States would have its third accidental president.
The Southern unionist and Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee at first seemed to be an ally of Republicans in the monumental task of Reconstruction, for he agreed that the Southern states could not come back unless they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. But Johnson's presidency quickly spiraled as he bitterly fought Congress over Reconstruction's control and sought to obstruct all efforts at achieving Black equality.
In this episode, historian Jim Oakes tells us what made Andrew Johnson arguably the worst president in U.S. history.
Further listening:
The Worst President? Meet James Buchanan w/ Jim Oakes
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If any Washington journalist can take us inside President Donald Trump's mind, it's Edward Luce. The Financial Times columnist and astute observer of American politics has frequently talked to Trump over the phone about the Iran war, the U.S. economy, and much else. Does the president have a plan, or is he winging it? Luce explains Trump's thinking as his second term collapses around him.
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On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a powerful address at a New York City church. "Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence" was a searing indictment of a U.S. war on a poor country. King's expansive critique of militarism and violence explained how the war was "devastating the hopes of the poor at home" by draining resources from LBJ's Great Society programs. The cause of civil rights, argued King, was not separate from antiwar activism.
Where are such voices today? Our guest is historian Michael Kazin.
Michael Kazin is a distinguished historian of U.S. political and social movements at Georgetown University and the author of "What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party."
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