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" The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger's move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. "

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" Is Donald Trump a fascist? It's an interesting question that has generated insightful commentary over the past few months, with the best answers situating Trumpian illiberalism within America's long history of racial oppression, slavery, Jim Crow apartheid, and the ongoing backlash to the loss of white privilege. "

Greg Grandin

Best

Past

Loss

" Within days of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, national-security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader cease-fire. "

" In Texas, the rangers were established on an ad hoc basis in the 1820s to protect the settlers making inroads into Spanish borderlands. Soon, Mexicans and Mexican Americans replaced Native Americans as the prime target of ranger repression. "

" Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. "

" Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his re-election on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African-Americans from federal jobs. "

" Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran. "

" The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling. "

" According to some tallies, since 1776, the United States has been at war 93 percent of its existence, passing through a mere 21 years of peace. "

" By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a 'highly advantageous mutual bargain' between the United States and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. "

" Since 2010, Hillary Clinton's State Department, with the aid of Brazil, France, and Canada and in league with the Clinton Foundation and other 'philanthropists,' put into place something like a never-ending coup, an everlasting intervention. "

Greg Grandin

Canada

Place

" The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions. "

" America is exceptional, it is asserted, because, with the exception of the abolition of slavery, it has been able to extend the promise of liberal reform mostly peacefully, through its democratic institutions. "

" In its original version, the FTAA was meant to be a special carve-out for Washington and Wall Street as global 'free trade' advanced under the umbrella of the Doha round of the WTO. "

" Caceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible. "

" If you search for Colombia on The Nation's website, you will see how key the country has been in regional politics. "

Greg Grandin

Country

See

" Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism. "

Greg Grandin

Life

Way

" After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008 but then supported it as secretary of state. "

" Defenders of Wilson are correct to beg for context when considering his legacy. But it is they who ignore the context: the role Wilson played in using war, including Haiti's racist counterinsurgency, to nationalize white supremacy, militarism, and Christian evangelism. "

" On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.' "

" Hillary Clinton's progress as a public figure and politician can, in fact, be indexed perfectly by her relationship to Henry Kissinger. "

" Such is the nature of the 'unity government' Clinton helped institutionalize. In her book, 'Hard Choices,' Clinton holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her trademark clear-eyed, 'pragmatic' foreign policy approach. Berta Caceres gave her life to fight that government. "

" If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam. "

" 'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident. "

" Migrants don't come to the United States because, as Ambassador Aponte argued in her press conference, of 'lies' told by smugglers that, once here, you can't get deported. They come because their countries have been destroyed by U.S. policy. "

" Harriet Washington, in 'Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,' documents the smallpox experiments Thomas Jefferson performed on his Monticello slaves. In fact, much of what we now think of as public health emerged from the slave system. "

" Kissinger celebrants inevitably point to two things to justify their admiration: an opening to China - 'rapprochement' - and improved relations with the Soviet Union - detente - which included SALT, a historic arms-limitation treaty. "

" In 2015, El Salvador suffered nearly 50,000 cases of dengue. Cuba had 1641 cases, no deaths, and one of the lowest incidence rates in the Americas. "

" Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, heavy-handedly provoked South American governments on any number of issues, including a rush to endorse the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, which only worked to steel resistance and build solidarity. "

" The argument that capitalism was dependent on slavery is, of course, not new. In 1944, Eric Williams, in 'Capitalism and Slavery,' made the case. "

" Starting in the early 1800s, Southerners in the United States began to defend slavery as their 'peculiar institution,' and northerners didn't mind, since the phrase suggested that chattel bondage was quarantined from the rest of the nation: that it was, or soon would be, a relic of its past and would not define its future. "