Category Archives: Diplomacy

by Aldous Huxley Most people know Cardinal Richelieu as the architect of France’s foreign policy during the reign of Louis XIII and the Thirty Years’ War.  Less well-known is his right-hand man, Father Joseph du Tremblay, the subject of Aldous Huxley’s biography Grey Eminence, which has been called the “best book on the intelligence operations of the French state” of that period. Father Joseph was a Capuchin monk, and even before entering politics, a serious mystic, whose successful evangelism seemed merely to take time from his efforts to achieve union […]

by David Fromkin World War I is arguably the major war both least interesting to and most important to Americans. It’s traditionally viewed here as a European Civil War that we tried mightily to stay out of. It’s frequently argued even now that our involvement was largely unnecessary, Zimmerman Telegram and unrestricted submarine warfare notwithstanding. It was not our great national crusade – that was WWII. Still, World War I created the 20th Century. World War II, the Cold War, post-colonialism and the decline of Europe all flowed from it. […]