The American Leviathan, Macron's Conversion, Lukashenko's Revelation, and More

Notes on the News

I’m working on a long newsletter about the history of American isolationism. I’ve become completely engrossed by the topic. Did you realize that everyone misunderstands that John Quincy Adams speech about not going in search of dragons to slay? Or that you can listen to all of Roosevelt’s fireside chats here, and they’re absolutely riveting? I’d always reckoned Roosevelt a great president, but now, at last, I understand what my grandparents were talking about when they told me they hung on his every word. I’m listening to his speeches and imagining how they must have sounded to them, given their position—though how well did they understand them, I wonder? How good could their English have been at the time? I’ll have to ask my father. (Pop?)

The Internet is such a blessing to anyone interested in history. To have all of this archival material online—to be able to study documents and sources that once would have required me to go to the Library of Congress, or a presidential library, all without so much as getting up from my sofa, and for free—it’s a miracle of modern life. As a teenager, if I’d wanted to listen to all of Roosevelt’s speeches, I’d have had to go to a university library. I don’t even know that the University of Washington had them. Truth be told, this is the first time I’ve ever listened to them, apart from the fragments I’ve heard in documentaries. I’ve read many of them. But listening to them is a very different experience from reading them. Try this, for example:

Why can’t we have a president like that now?

While I’m working on this, though, I wanted to share a few things that caught my eye today.

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1. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Allen Lane, £25). The authors are professors at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins, and this is said to be the “foreign policy book of the year.”