History As It Happens

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In leafy Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., there stands a bronze statue of the fifteenth president of the United States. Only an inscription etched in the surrounding marble identifies its subject: BUCHANAN.
Yes, a statue to the terrible James Buchanan, who interfered in a notorious Supreme Court ruling, consistently took the side of the Southern Slave Power, and barely lifted a finger to save the Union after seven states seceded on his watch.
Is it fair to lambast this hapless figure? What could Buchanan have done differently to avert the Civil War? Historian James Oakes is our guest.
Recommended reading:
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 by James Oakes

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As some Israeli government ministers call for the "voluntary migration" of all Palestinians from Gaza, the term ethnic cleansing is back in the news. Before the 1990s, international institutions and mainstream political figures seldom used the term. Then came the Serb atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia, and ethnic cleansing gained wide acceptance.
What does it mean? Does it have a legal grounding? Or is it a euphemism for genocide? Our guest is sociologist Martin Shaw, a leading genocide scholar and professor emeritus of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex.
Further reading:
The Genocide that Changed the World by Martin Shaw (Journal of Genocide Research)

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A special tribunal in The Hague convicted a hero of Kosovo's independence struggle of war crimes. Hashim Thaci was sentenced to 25 years for the crimes of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder. Three other former Kosovo Liberation Army figures were also convicted for targeting ethnic Albanians whom they suspected of collaborating with the Serbian invaders in the late 1990s.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, and in the arena of international law, successful war crimes prosecutions are difficult. So, what happened in Kosovo as the U.S. bombed Serbian targets — as ethnic Albanians were expelled by the hundreds of thousands?
Alex Whiting is our guest. He teaches at Harvard Law School and is an expert on international criminal law. He worked at the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague and once interviewed Hashim Thaci as part of an investigation.

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Vladimir Putin and the Russian foreign policy establishment's goal is not to outlast the West only in Ukraine, but to create an alternate world order of anti-Western countries, a world where Russia can evade sanctions, throw around its influence, and disseminate its propaganda to receptive audiences. This is according to political scientist Hanna Notte, the author of 'We Shall Outlast Them: Putin's Global Campaign to Defeat the West.'
Is it working? Moscow's global efforts have produced mixed results while, says Notte, doing long-term damage to Russia itself. For starters, the war in Ukraine remains a grinding stalemate.
Hanna Notte is the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Her expertise is in Russian foreign policy, the Middle East, and arms control.

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The Constitution created what were supposed to be three coequal branches, and only Congress was given the authority to declare war. Yet we are living in the age of the imperial presidency — of endless war, executive orders, government secrecy, and a lack of accountability. These are all fit for a monarchy instead of a republic.
How did we get here? What structures led to the rise of the imperial presidency? What decisions led to this unintended consequence undermining the American democratic experiment?
Our guest is Jeremi Suri, who teaches history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s the author of The Impossible Presidency and co-host of This is Democracy podcast.
Suri also writes the Democracy of Hope newsletter.

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