In recent years, publishers have released a deluge of new books on relations between China and the United States, some predicting conflict and others offering formulas for maintaining peace. Surprisingly, however, there have been few …
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address in Volgograd on 2 February, in which he sought to draw moral parallels between the heroic Soviet defence of Stalingrad in World War II and the current Russian invasion of …
There was a time when well-meaning, if not wishful-thinking, Westerners thought that ‘China’s Gorbachev’ was the highest compliment they could pay a Chinese leader who looked like a reformer. But when Zhu Rongji, the straight-talking …
‘We all need to have perestroika,’ Mikhail Gorbachev would often say. The Soviet Union’s last leader lived by that credo. After becoming the general secretary of the communist party in 1985 and implementing his program …
Great powers don’t die in bed, the realist judgement goes. Empires fall amid flames and war. Not so, answered Mikhail Gorbachev, proving his greatness by achieving the gentle end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s achievement …