Nations still prepare brilliantly for the last war while the next one reinvents itself, drones in Ukraine and Iran, and the terrifying question of what nuclear powers do when conventional tools fail.
The easy parallel between the 1920s and our 2020s is economic and technological. The more important connection runs deeper and into the human conditions of fear, identity, and the habit of reaching for a scapegoat when the world changes too fast.
Foreign policy as table talk only works if you know the cards. Against Xi, Zelensky, and Iran, and a still-closed Strait of Hormuz, the bluff is getting expensive and the chips are real.
As this piece is written, President Trump is in Beijing. He arrived yesterday at Beijing Capital International Airport, where he was greeted not by Xi Jinping — as protocol and the president's own hype machine had suggested — but by a vice foreign minister and a vice president.
"Guns and Butter" economic worries from the 1960's that caused rampant inflation in the 1970's are back. But just as Mark Twain once said that "history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes" so goes today's economic policy mix that has now divided FOMC voting members, for good reason, on what to do next on monetary policy…
For most American football fans, the 1984 Super Bowl XVIII was a "snoozer". After all, the Los Angeles Raiders routed the Washington Redskins 38 to 9 that day in a game whose outcome felt preordained at the opening kick.
From Google Gemini's perspective it is important to know where one comes from because understanding one's own origins, acts as a rearview mirror that provides clarity for one's future path.
Being born in the early 1960's, my first memories of "news that mattered" came from Walter Cronkite who was the anchorman for the CBS Evening News during an epic run that lasted from 1962 to 1981, which was also was an extraordinarily volatile period in US and world history.