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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Thirty-five years ago, a U.S. administration built an international coalition and received congressional authorization to fight a major war in the Middle East. Today, an American president leaps into war with a videotaped announcement and not a peep of public debate. In this episode, historian Jeffrey Engel compares and contrasts the First Gulf War of 1990-91 to today's U.S.-Israeli onslaught on Iran. In some important ways, today's conflict was made possible by the earlier war, which, at the time, was considered a decisive victory. But there were unintended consequences: the U.S. has been unable to extract itself from the Middle East.
Historian Jeffrey Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. 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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Subscribe for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode on Thursday, March 12.
What is neoliberalism? Is it to blame for the crisis of American democracy? In this follow-up episode to What is Neoliberalism?, the historian Nelson Lichtenstein discusses the enormous economic changes that have transformed American capitalism, from free trade to global financialization following the Cold War's final chapter. Rather than "neoliberalism," today's complex problems would seem to need a new lexicon.
Recommended reading:
A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
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The regionwide war now engulfing the Greater Middle East has threatened to involve Turkey, after Iranian ballistic missiles headed for the country were successfully intercepted by NATO air defenses. Also, last month, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett warned that a "new Turkish threat is emerging," accusing Ankara of plotting to encircle Israel with Islamist allies. In this episode, historian Howard Eissenstat explains Turkey's real interests in the war's outcome and why its relationship with Israel is dangerously deteriorating.
Howard Eissenstat teaches at St. Lawrence University and the Stockholm University Institute of Turkish Studies (SUITS). Eissenstat's research focuses on the intersection of nationalism, religious identity, and policy in the Turkish Republic.
Recommended reading:
The Next Big Middle East Conflict? by Howard Eissenstat
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The Nazis were in many ways unique, but the Army psychiatrist who evaluated the two dozen defendants at Nuremberg in 1945 saw in Germany's war criminals the potential for authoritarianism in all societies, including America. Douglas Kelley's warnings were not well received at the time, but they resonate today, as unaccountable authoritarian figures make war in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Author Jack El-Hai is our guest.
Jack El-Hai is a magazine writer and nonfiction author who covers history, medicine, and crime. Among his many books is The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII.
Credit: Audio excerpts are from Nuremberg (2025), Sony Pictures Classics.
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In wars from Eastern Europe to the Greater Middle East, new technologies and tactics are transforming some battlefields, while in other theaters, warring states are leaning on failed ideas and magical thinking to somehow produce different and better outcomes — all while civilians shudder under the earth-shaking power of missiles and bombs. In this episode, Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft reflects on the changing face of battle and the old mistakes repeated by modern statesmen.
Recommended reading:
Ukraine marks biggest evolution in military tactics since WWII by Anatol Lieven (Responsible Statecraft)
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Is the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran legal under international law? Did President Donald Trump fulfill his oath to the Constitution before hurling the country into another war in the Greater Middle East? And what about Iran's retaliation, which is sending missiles and drones into Gulf States aligned with the U.S? In this episode, Adil Haque, an expert on international law and the ethics of war, answers pressing questions about the new conflict threatening to pitch the Greater Middle East into chaos.
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Subscribe for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode on Monday, March 2.
This is the third episode in an occasional series for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The idea of the frontier compelled Americans to seek new lands and independence since before the days of the American Revolution. Before the United States became a powerful global empire, ordinary Americans sought to conquer a continent, making war against Native Peoples. In this episode, historian Alan Taylor explains what drove common farmers to cross the Appalachians despite a royal proclamation forbidding such settlement.
Alan Taylor is professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
America250 podcast series:
Episode 1: Thomas Paine's Common Sense
Episode 2: Ideas of the American Revolution
Recommended reading:
American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
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Editor's note: Shortly after this episode was published, news broke that Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an air strike.
Americans awoke on Saturday to learn their leaders, along with Israel, launched another unprovoked air attack against Iran. Unlike last June's 12-day-long war, President Donald Trump says the goal this time around is to topple the clerical regime in Tehran so the Iranian people can rise up. Historian Jeremi Suri, an expert on U.S. foreign policy, joins this special episode of History As It Happens to assess the start of another U.S. war of choice in the Greater Middle East.
Historian Jeremi Suri teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He co-hosts This is Democracy podcast and co-writes Democracy of Hope newsletter.
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Twenty-six years after coming to power, Vladimir Putin is prosecuting a ruinous war in Ukraine and tightening the screws of repression at home. How much longer can his rule endure under these suffocating circumstances? In this episode, historian Nina Khrushcheva shares what she saw during her recent trip to Russia — in a society descending into tyranny, but where some expressions of discontent are still permitted.
Khrushcheva teaches at the New School. She is an editor of and a contributor to Project Syndicate. She's the author of several books, including one about her great-grandfather: Nikita Khrushchev: An Outlier of the System (2024).
Recommended reading:
Russia's Descent into Tyranny by Nina Khrushcheva in Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine is entering its fifth year with no end in sight despite several rounds of U.S.-mediated negotiating sessions. The battlefield dead and wounded have reportedly surpassed a million men, yet neither side is on the brink of military or political collapse. Neither side is close to victory. In this episode, historians Michael Kimmage and Mark Galeotti try to place this tragic and unnecessary conflict in historical perspective, as the opposing armies send a generation of their young to fight and die over piles of rubble in eastern Ukraine.
Michael Kimmage is the founding director of the independent Kennan Institute. He is the author of "Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability."
Mark Galeotti is an Honorary Professor at University College London, an expert on Russian military history, and the author of many books, including "Forged in War: A Military History of Russia From Its Beginnings to Today."
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