Join 📚 Sara's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what sara's read, .
Markets do not always require democracy in order to function: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China all developed successful economies under less than democratic conditions. The Cold War experience showed, though, that it is not easy to keep
The Cold War
John Lewis Gaddis
Americans and Europeans rarely ask themselves whether the widespread popular loathing of Western policy in the Middle East might actually be justified. In America, it is the 444-day hostage situation endured by US diplomats in Tehran from 1979 to 1981 that is seen as the outrage of the era, rather than the self-serving and illegal removal of Mossadegh three decades before. The
Soviet Union’s support for Marxist revolutionaries in Africa, its SS-20 deployment, and its invasion of Afghanistan look less like a coordinated strategy to shift the global balance of power and more like the absence of any strategy at all. For what kind of logic assumes the permanence of unexpected windfalls? What kind of regime provokes those upon whom it has become economically dependent? What kind of leadership, for that matter, commits itself to the defense of human rights—as at Helsinki in 1975—but then is surprised when its own citizens claim such rights? The U.S.S.R. under Brezhnev’s faltering rule had become incapable of performing the most fundamental task of any effective strategy: the efficient use of available means to accomplish chosen ends
The Cold War
John Lewis Gaddis
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise