american wings essay

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The American Wing

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is situated in Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape diaspora, and historically a gathering and trading place for many diverse Native Peoples, who continue to live and work on this island. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, and future—for their ongoing and fundamental relationships to the region.

Ever since its establishment in 1870, the Museum has acquired important examples of American art. A separate "American Wing" to display the domestic arts of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries opened in 1924; painting and sculpture galleries and a skylit courtyard were added in 1980.

Today, the Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Monumental sculpture, stained glass, and architectural elements are installed in the Charles Engelhard Court; silver, gold, glass, and ceramics on the courtyard balconies. Narratives of American domestic architecture and furnishings, 1680–1915, are explored in twenty historical interiors, or period rooms. Changing rotations of painting, sculpture, works on paper, and textiles appear throughout the Wing.

The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art , our open-storage area and installation space, is also a special attraction.  Browse and learn more about the collection .

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ARTS & CULTURE

A brief history of the buffalo chicken wing.

How the wing went from a throwaway to a delicacy in 50 years

Joseph Stromberg

With the Super Bowl around the corner, it seems that buffalo chicken wings may have become the country’s favorite football-watching food. While the annual rumors that we’re running out of wings simply aren’t true , wings have indeed  become the most expensive part of the chicken  due to their popularity when fried and covered in buffalo sauce.

Few of us realize, though, that less than 50 years ago, wings were considered one of the least desirable cuts of the chicken—a throwaway part often cooked into stock—and “buffalo” was just a wooly ungulate that wandered the Plains.

Despite the recency of the invention, the event itself is shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless, there is one thing we know for certain: the “buffalo” in the name definitively refers to the city in Western New York. The most authoritative account is by  New Yorker  writer Calvin Trillin , who investigated the dish’s history in 1980 as he sampled the city’s most well-regarded wing joints. He presented two competing versions of how a stroke of serendipity led Teressa Bellissimo, proprietor of the Anchor Bar, to invent the dish in 1964.

Her husband Frank Bellissimo, who founded the bar with Teressa in 1939, told Trillin that the invention involved a mistake—the delivery of chicken wings, instead of necks, which the family typically used when cooking up spaghetti sauce. To avoid wasting the wings, he asked Teressa to concoct a bar appetizer; the result was the wing we know today.

Dominic—Frank and Teressa’s son, who took over management of the restaurant sometime in the ’70s—told a slightly more colorful tale:

It was late on a Friday night in 1964, a time when Roman Catholics still confined themselves to fish and vegetables on Fridays…Some regulars had been spending a lot of money, and Dom asked his mother to make something special to pass around gratis at the stroke of midnight. Teressa Bellissimo picked up some chicken wings—parts of a chicken that most people do not consider even good enough to give away to barflies—and the Buffalo chicken wing was born.

Both Frank and Dominic agreed on a few other crucial details—that Teressa cut each wing in half to produce a “drumstick” and a “flat,” that she deep-fried them without breading and covered them in a hot sauce, and that she served them with celery (from the house antipasto) and blue cheese salad dressing. They also both reported that they became popular within weeks throughout the city, where they were (and are still) simply called “wings” or “chicken wings.”

But there are even more competing versions of the story. John E. Harmon, a professor of geography at Central Connecticut State University who wrote the  Atlas of Popular Culture in the Northeastern United States   as a sabbatical project, writes that Teressa actually improvised the recipe to serve Dominic and a group of his friends when they ambled into the bar late at night.

The most dissimilar account is also mentioned by Trillin, who wrote that on his trip to Buffalo, he met a man named John Young who bluntly stated, “I am actually the creator of the wing.” Young points out that growing up in an African-American community, he’d frequently eaten chicken wings as a standard dish; what he invented was a special “mambo sauce” for the wings he served at his restaurant, John Young’s Wings ’n Things, during the mid-’60s. But he served his wings breaded and whole (rather than chopped into flats and drumsticks), distinctions that suggest to many wing traditionalists that they belong to an entire different category.

While it’s uncertain which creation myth is most accurate, what happened over the next few decades is clear: buffalo chicken wings exploded in popularity across the country. During the 70′s, the recipe spread to other eateries in the city and state— Duff’s , an early adopter, remains a favorite wing joint of many Buffalonians—then went national with the founding of chains like Wings N’Curls in Florida. Harmon reports that Trillin’s article itself sparked further interest, as did the 1983 founding of Hooter’s, which featured wings at the center of its menu.

In 1994, Domino’s spent $32 million advertising their national roll-out of wings, and Pizza Hut quickly followed suit. Since, the growth of chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and the placement of wings on countless local menus means that they’re essentially available anywhere in the United States. They’re gradually penetrating international markets, too, with  Buffalo Wild Wings planning to open locations  in Dubai, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia later this year.

Nowadays, buffalo sauce has gone beyond wings—it’s frequently used for boneless chicken fingers and  pizzas , and gas stations sell everything from buffalo-flavored  Combos  to  Pringles . In Buffalo, though, wings are still eaten roughly the way they were invented by Teressa in 1964: served in either hot, medium or mild buffalo sauce ,  with blue cheese and celery.

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Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

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AMERICAN WINGS

Chicago's pioneering black aviators and the race for equality in the sky.

by Sherri L. Smith & Elizabeth Wein ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2024

A fascinating, well-told American story full of compelling innovation.

An account of how brilliant and resourceful early-20th-century Black aviators created their own runway to the skies.

Originally trained as auto mechanics, Cornelius Robinson Coffey and John Charles Robinson shared a common dream of becoming pilots despite facing racism. “We’re going to make it regardless,” Coffey prophetically declared after they were both reluctantly admitted—under threat of a lawsuit—into Chicago’s Curtiss–Wright School of Aviation. They successfully finished their program, persuading the school’s initially hostile director to register a cohort of Black students whom they could teach as assistant instructors. Coffey and Robinson then sought interested men and women through advertisements in the Chicago Defender , whose publisher sponsored pioneering Black pilot Bessie Coleman. They organized the Brown Eagle Aero Club, and Robinson even accepted an invitation from Haile Selassie to help train Ethiopian pilots as the country prepared to defend itself against fascist Italy. Smith and Wein tightly thread together overlapping narrative threads, including the early evolution of aviation, the history of Tuskegee University, the role of the African American press, and tense geopolitical matters concerning the only African country to have escaped European colonization. Photographs scattered throughout are an additional treat, adding a special layer to the storytelling. The writing is accessible and buoyant, creating anticipation for what is to come, all culminating in an engaging slice of history.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780593323984

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT HISTORY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Sherri L. Smith

THE NEW QUEER CONSCIENCE

From the pocket change collective series.

by Adam Eli ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020

Small but mighty necessary reading.

A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.

Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky

by Gaby Melian

by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky

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Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

New York Times Bestseller

THEY CALLED US ENEMY

by George Takei & Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott ; illustrated by Harmony Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2019

A powerful reminder of a history that is all too timely today.

A beautifully heart-wrenching graphic-novel adaptation of actor and activist Takei’s ( Lions and Tigers and Bears , 2013, etc.) childhood experience of incarceration in a World War II camp for Japanese Americans.

Takei had not yet started school when he, his parents, and his younger siblings were forced to leave their home and report to the Santa Anita Racetrack for “processing and removal” due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The creators smoothly and cleverly embed the historical context within which Takei’s family’s story takes place, allowing readers to simultaneously experience the daily humiliations that they suffered in the camps while providing readers with a broader understanding of the federal legislation, lawsuits, and actions which led to and maintained this injustice. The heroes who fought against this and provided support to and within the Japanese American community, such as Fred Korematsu, the 442nd Regiment, Herbert Nicholson, and the ACLU’s Wayne Collins, are also highlighted, but the focus always remains on the many sacrifices that Takei’s parents made to ensure the safety and survival of their family while shielding their children from knowing the depths of the hatred they faced and danger they were in. The creators also highlight the dangerous parallels between the hate speech, stereotyping, and legislation used against Japanese Americans and the trajectory of current events. Delicate grayscale illustrations effectively convey the intense emotions and the stark living conditions.

Pub Date: July 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-60309-450-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Top Shelf Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2019

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by George Takei ; illustrated by Michelle Lee

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What’s Past is Prologue

Aviation Heritage with American Wings!

• July 22, 2024

Sherri L. Smith and I were royally hosted by the Warren County Public Library at the Aviation Heritage Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky on Sunday, 7 July 2024. We did our American Wings double act beneath the wings of a Coffey School of Aeronautics Piper Cub once owned by Willa Brown, now the centerpiece of Bowling Green’s Aviation Heritage Park display. We got choked up when we saw this plane!

(Pause to apologize for the consistent 2-week lag in my event reporting.)

Courtney Stevens, the Director of the Warren County Public Library (and YA author in her own right: http://www.courtneycstevens.com/novels/ ), was responsible for pulling this together, and she, Sherri, and I spent about six months plotting the complexities of bringing Sherri from Los Angeles and me from Scotland so that we’d arrive at the same time. But we did, the day before the event – touching down in Nashville within an hour of each other, and Sherri was there to meet me at the gate when I stepped off my flight – a pleasure that is very rare in these times of advanced airport security! The first thing we did was to buy a bottle of “Altitude” chardonnay to take to Diane and Hosanna Banks, my friend Amanda’s mother and sister, who welcomed us to Nashville with a delicious meal of grilled salmon in Diane’s beautiful house (which narrowly missed being destroyed by a tornado in May 2020 – her garage and trees did not survive).

It was a lovely welcome to the area, but only the first of a series of joyful encounters. On our way to Bowling Green the next morning, in the rental car generously provided by Courtney, we stopped at Nashville’s Parnassus Books to look around and sign any author copies they might have on hand. There were indeed a few, and we just happened to drop in when Ann Patchett, the owner, was visiting! We had a fantastic conversation with Ann and one of the supersmart and multitalented sales assistants – talking about writing and teaching and publishing for about twenty minutes before we had to rush off. Ann was extremely gracious and friendly. I MIGHT HAVE FANGIRLED HER A BIT. ( The Dutch House is one of my favorite books of recent years, and Tom Lake put me on to Thornton Wilder.)

We had to have lunch in the parking lot of a Wendy’s because we’d lingered so long at Parnassus Books, but we made it to the Aviation Heritage Park in Bowling Green right on time, where we were greeted by Courtney’s deputy, Laura Beth Fox-Ezell (the library’s Executive Program Manager), or LB for short. Courtney was recovering from a medical procedure and couldn’t be there, but LB had everything ready for the event – our slide show was already loaded and she’d even set up a “green room” stocked with coffee and cakes from a local café.

But instead of eating we got caught up in the excitement of meeting Bob Bubnis, the Executive Director of the Aviation Heritage Park, and Dan Cherry (aka Brigadier General E. Daniel Cherry) – a career fighter pilot and the author of My Enemy, My Friend: A Story of Reconciliation from the Vietnam War. Dan is an air force veteran and public servant with an awe-inspiring list of credentials and decorations to his name, and also the former commander of the Thunderbirds air demonstration team. [STARS IN OUR EYES.] This formidable man was as excited about meeting us as we were about meeting him, because he’d been sent by his friend General Lloyd W. “Fig” Newton to get a picture with us. Fig, another highly decorated fighter pilot and Vietnam vet, was the first African-American pilot in the Thunderbirds, and he’d read and loved American Wings and recommended it to Dan! Sherri and I were both awed . And so very, very delighted.

Honestly, our event itself was just icing on the cake after that. It lasted about two hours by the time the Q&A was wrapped up. Sherri and I secretly confessed to each other afterward that we felt our teamwork was ever so slightly off our game after a six month absence, but I don’t think anyone noticed (whereas at the Octavia Butler School in January an audience member asked us if we were “best friends,” this time an audience member told us that we interacted “like sisters”)!

Here are the Warren County Library’s photos of the event: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/EFUTSg2GjuBkpZA3/?

After the event we signed stacks of books and the very last person in the signing queue was Kim Green, another friend of mine – and a pilot, a public radio broadcaster, and author who recently published Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes, an amazing memoir that she’s been working with in collaboration with its author Chantha Nguon. (More here: https://aviatrixkim.com/kims-bio/ ) Kim took us for a quick driving tour of Nashville’s Broadway honky tonk strip, then treated us to a meal at a restaurant called City House where we talked about, you guessed it, writing, the publishing industry, and the fascinating history behind Slow Noodles.

It was an amazing weekend all around. And we are hoping to return in 2025 for the opening of an exhibit dedicated to Willa Brown at the Aviation Heritage Park. Watch this space!

Sherri and I got interviewed by the local ABC TV station, WBKO, so you can experience a wee taste of our sister act here:

https://www.wbko.com/2024/07/08/american-wings-authors-highlight-black-aviators-wcpl-author-series/

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American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky

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Essay Topics

Essays should be typed in 12 pt standard font, double spaced and use parenthetical references.  

• A theme is a central idea that unifies an entire literary work.  A motif is a recurring object, concept, or structure.  In a literary analysis essay, use a motif in American Wings; Iranian Roots to discuss a theme.
• The moral structure of a character includes his or her dedication to certain core values.  Moral structure can be examined by a character’s interaction with other characters, actions, dialogue, and (if applicable) inner thoughts.  In a literary analysis essay, discuss the moral structure of a major character in American Wings; Iranian Roots.
• *In a literary analysis essay, examine three significant moments/conflicts in the life of a character in American Wings; Iranian Roots . Discuss how each moment/conflict contributes to character or thematic development.
• Throughout American Wings; Iranian Roots Reza wrestles with a variety of internal and external conflicts.  Compare and contrast the internal and external conflicts he wrestles and he responds to those conflicts.
• The socio-political climate in Iran during the time frame of the story has a tremendous impact.  In a comparison-contrast essay, explore the Iranian society under the rule of The Shah, under Ayatollah Khomeini and the effect(s) on one or more characters in the story.
• *In a comparison-contrast essay, analyze the change in the relationship of either Reza and Soraya, Reza and Ardeshir or Reza and Hassan.  Compare and contrast the dynamics of the relationship at the three significant moments.
• Examine the laws imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini or the reforms of the Shah’s government.  In an e xpository essay explain the ideologies reflected in the laws/reforms, the effect on the population, and the impact in the Middle East.
• In an expository essay, examine the root causes of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.  Consider analysis through the comparison of other revolutions, the history of the region and the role of religion.
• *In an expository essay, examine the role of Mr. Mehdian, Farid and Kahn as it relates to disseminating historical facts to both Reza and the reader.
• To stereotype is to judge a person or a group of people based on generalities often framed in prejudice rather than facts.  In a persuasive essay, using examples from American Wings; Iranian Roots and other sources, develop an argument supporting or refuting the value of studying multi-cultural literature in an educational setting.
• The American ideology of the separation of church and state is a topic of continual discussion, redefinition and debate.  In a persuasive essay, using examples from American Wings; Iranian Roots and other sources, development an argument supporting or refuting the value of the separation of church and state.
• *In a persuasive essay, choose a significant character and develop an argument that he or she reflected three specific heroic qualities more so than any other character in the story.

Points For Additional Analysis

Social-Political Chapter Summary Social-Political Chapter Summary

Research Topics

The Hero’s Journey

A Traditional American Food: Buffalo Wings - Essay Example

• Subject: Other
• Type: Essay
• Level: High School
• Pages: 2 (500 words)
• Downloads: 16
• Author: schmittantwan

Extract of sample "A Traditional American Food: Buffalo Wings"

What makes this recipe a uniquely American tradition? Buffalo wings are chicken wings “deep fried without any coating or breading, after which they are slathered in that zesty bright orange sauce which is a combination of melted butter, hot sauce, and red pepper” (Suddath, par. 4).

The plump wings are cooked just right to make them crispy, even if it is not breaded. It is very juicy yet not too saucy. The sweet and salty taste of the wings is perfectly combined with the hot and spicy blends in the sauce. Its peppery taste does not overpower the other flavors. It simply adds to the zestiness of the wings. This dish is truly mouth-watering and sumptuous. This delicious dish does not only boasts of its splendid taste. While the wings are being cooked, one cannot resist the aroma that it evokes.

It has a very savory scent brought about by the mixture of the various spices and flavors infused in the wings. The smell of the Buffalo wings, while they are slowly baked in the oven, is simply irresistible. There is no over-powering odor. The vinegar in the sauce makes the fragrance slightly acetic but still very mild. The sweet smell of the wings is not significant yet enough to tickle your nose and tempt your appetite. The American’s penchant for Buffalo wings is indeed understandable. With all the different flavors put into the wings, it is no wonder that the dish has gone a long way all over the world.

In recognition of Frank and Teressa Bellissimo’s original recipe, a “Chicken Wing Day” was proclaimed in the city of Buffalo in New York in 1977. Buffalo wings are an instant hit anywhere they are served. There are now several versions of the original Anchor Bar’s Buffalo wings everywhere. Most fast food chains already carry their version of the Buffalo wings. However, no matter what changes they put in the ingredients and in the method of cooking, Buffalo wings remain to be one of the favorite comfort food people around the world love. The appetizing appearance, the savory aroma, and the scrumptious taste of Buffalo wings all merge to make this American food a real stand-out!  

• Cited: 3 times
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Quote Investigator®

Tracing Quotations

There Are Two Lasting Bequests We Can Give Our Children: Roots and Wings

Henry Ward Beecher? Jonas Salk? Hodding Carter? Wise Woman? Ronald Reagan? Jean W. Rindlaub? Anonymous?

Dear Quote Investigator: The goals of child rearing have sometimes been explicated using two vivid metaphors: roots and wings. This contrasting figurative language presents a powerful though oddly incongruous combination:

Parents should provide their children with roots and wings. There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other wings. Good parents give their children roots and wings: roots to know where home is, and wings to fly off and practice what has been taught them.

Expressions of this type have been linked to the clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, the scientist Jonas Salk, and the journalist Hodding Carter. Would you please explore this topic?

Quote Investigator: The earliest evidence of a strong match located by QI was published in 1953 in the book “Where Main Street Meets the River” by Hodding Carter who was a prominent newspaper editor. The expression was credited to an anonymous “wise woman”. Bold face has been added to excerpts: [1] 1953, Where Main Street Meets the River by Hodding Carter, Chapter 27: It’s How We like It, Quote Page 337, Published by Rinehart & Company, New York. (Verified on paper)

A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings. And they can only be grown, these roots and these wings, in the home. We want our sons’ roots to go deep into the soil beneath them and into the past, not in arrogance but in confidence.

QI has found no substantive evidence that the well-known nineteenth-century minister Henry Ward Beecher used this expression. There is some evidence that the famous research scientist Jonas Salk employed a version of the saying, but citations occurred many years after Carter’s instance was already in circulation.

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In 1920 a book reviewer in “The Smith Alumnae Quarterly” titled an article “Roots and Wings” and used the two terms metaphorically while discussing the development of the young main character in a novel. The following passage does not really fit into the set of expressions under investigation, but it can be considered a thematic precursor: [2] 1920 February, The Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Volume 11, Number 2, Let Us Talk of Many Things: Roots and Wings, Start Page 129, Quote Page 129, Published by the Alumnae Association of Smith College, … Continue reading

Isabel, Mrs. Lee’s heroine, had wings, too, and felt them unfolding; when she became aware of her roots and discovered that the soil was not the kind best for her development, she transplanted herself without betraying any cramping regard for parental disapproval.

In 1953 the editor Hodding Carter employed the expression and attributed the words to an unidentified woman as noted previously:

A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings.

In May 1953 the saying was further disseminated in the mass-circulation periodical “The Reader’s Digest”. The passage from Carter was slightly simplified by the deletion of “she said” and quotation marks were added: [3] 1953 May, Reader’s Digest, Volume 62, (Freestanding quotation), Quote Page 52, The Reader’s Digest Association. (Verified on paper)

A wise woman once said to me: “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings.” — Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River (Rinehart)

In December 1953 a newspaper in San Marino, California discussed an essay contest sponsored by an area bank and the prize-winning work written by a student. The essay included an instance of the saying ascribed to a “wise woman”: [4] 1953 December 31, San Marino Tribune, A Teenager Looks At The Future: Winning Essay, (Essay by Mary Gorrell), Quote Page 5, Column 4 and 5, San Marino, California. (NewspaperArchive)

The youth of our country has the opportunity to go forward in many fields, which will be a trying challenge. A wise woman once said, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other wings.”

In 1958 a newspaper in Janesville, Wisconsin reported on a welcoming speech delivered by a pastor to a group of new teachers which included the distinctive phrase “roots and wings”: [5] 1958 September 23, Janesville Daily Gazette, Welcome New Fort Teachers, Quote Page 8, Column 7, Janesville, Wisconsin. (NewspaperArchive)

In the schools, teachers provided children with “roots and wings,” the Rev. Mr. Strosahl said, roots representing the American heritage. Teachers help those roots grow strong, he said, but through wisdom and independence, “children take wings … and develop into wondrous people.”

In 1959 the “Altoona Mirror” newspaper of Pennsylvania published a regular feature with the title “Mirrorgrams” that presented miscellaneous adages. A concise instance of the statement without attribution was printed in one column: [6] 1959 July 28, Altoona Mirror, Mirrorgrams, Quote Page 8, Column 2, Altoona, Pennsylvania. (NewspaperArchive)

Two lasting bequests possible for parents to give their children are roots and wings.

Also in 1959 a book titled “Marriage and Family life: A Jewish View” included a streamlined version of the saying with an acknowledgement to Carter: [7] 1959, Marriage and Family life: A Jewish View, Edited by Abraham B. Shoulson, Chapter: Ten Commandments for Parents by Julius Mark, Quote Page 299, Twayne Publishers, New York. (Verified with scans)

What is the finest and most lasting bequest that we can leave to our children? Hodding Carter in his book, When Main Street Meets the River, quotes a very wise woman who once said to him, “There are only two lasting bequests that we can hope to give our children—roots and wings.” And they can be grown—these roots and wings—only in the home.

In 1962 the “Lifetime Speaker’s Encyclopedia” by Jacob M. Braude included the adage without ascription: [8] 1962, Lifetime Speaker’s Encyclopedia by Jacob M. Braude, Volume 1, Section: Child Care, Quote Page 107, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. (HathiTrust Full View) link

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings

In 1963 a religious periodical called “The Lighted Pathway” elaborated on the meaning of the saying: [9] 1963 May, The Lighted Pathway, Volume 34, Number 5, The Crowning Joy by Mrs. F. W. Goff, Quote Page 6, Column 2, Published by the Church of God Publishing House, Cleveland, Tennessee. (Verified with … Continue reading

Jean Wade Rindlaub , speaker at an American Mothers’ Committee Meeting had this to say: “There are only two bequests we can leave our children. Roots and wings. Roots in such things as the true deep faith which has stood our ancestors in such good stead through the generations. Roots which will guide our children in choosing between the true and the false, the just and the unjust. And wings that will teach a child how to soar into wider and still wider worlds of understanding.”

On September 9, 1982 President Ronald Reagan released a message for Grandparents Day that included an instance of the expression credited to Henry Ward Beecher: [10] 1982, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Ronald Reagan Administration, Week Ending September 13, 1982, Pages 1089 to 1111, Volume 18, Number 36, Message of the President: Grandparents Day, … Continue reading

Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots…the other, wings.”

In 1993 the blockbuster inspirational collection “Chicken Soup for the Soul” was published, and it included an essay by the educator and author Bettie B. Youngs. She stated that she heard a version of the saying from Jonas Salk, the scientist famous for pioneering the development of the polio vaccine: [11] 1993, Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart & Rekindle the Spirit, Compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Essay: Why I Chose My Father To Be My Dad by Bettie B. … Continue reading [12] 2012 (First published in 1993), Chicken Soup for the Soul: Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit, Compiled by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Essay: Why I Chose My Father To Be My … Continue reading

“Good parents,” Jonas Salk once told me, “give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.”

Also in 1993 a memoir by the Texas politician John Connally was published, and it included an instance of the saying attributed to Beecher: [13] 1993, In History’s Shadow: An American Odyssey by John Connally with Mickey Herskowitz, Quote Page 40, Published by Hyperion, New York. (Verified on paper)

I am partial to a quotation from Henry Ward Beecher: “There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children. One of these is roots . . . the other, wings.” My parents had truly given me the former; now they were making the most difficult gift a mother or father can provide, the gift of wings.

In 1999 “Ancestry” magazine printed an “Editor’s Note” with a shortened instance of the statement ascribed to Carter: [14] 1999 November-December, Ancestry, Volume 17, Number 5, Editor’s Note by Loretto Dennis Szucs, Quote Page 7, Published by Ancestry.com Orem, Utah. (Google Books Full View)

“Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings,” wrote newspaper editor and reporter, Hodding Carter.

In conclusion, this item of sagacity was popularized by Hodding Carter in 1953; yet, Carter did not take credit for its original promulgation. He ascribed the words to an unnamed wise woman. In the 1990s Bettie B. Youngs attributed an instance to Jonas Salk who died in 1995. If Salk spoke a version of the saying then QI suspects he was relaying an expression that he had heard in the past.

(Great thanks to William Rapaport whose query led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Rapaport helpfully noted that the saying had been attributed to Beecher, Salk, and Carter.)

Update History: On March 1, 2015 the 1993 John Connally citation was added.

August 18, 2024

published by phi beta kappa

Print or web publication, writing in the wings.

An excerpt from A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas by Dan O’Brien

Six years ago, playwright Dan O’Brien’s wife, actress Jessica St. Clair, discovered a cancerous lump on her breast. Shortly after, O’Brien was diagnosed with colon cancer. Did they both get sick, they wondered, because they had lived so close to the World Trade Center on and after 9/11? In the tumultuous years that followed, O’Brien turned to what he knew best: writing. His new essay collection, A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas, is based on a series of craft lectures—this excerpt comes from the essay “Unspeakable: Speech Onstage,” on writing dialogue for theater.

In the middle of writing this I underwent a procedure. It had been a year and a half since I finished cancer treatment, and two years since my wife finished hers. In my paper gown and turquoise hospital socks, with the curtain rolled tight around me, I laid there listening to the other patients in the prep room behind their curtains conversing with their nurses. So many things said struck my ears vividly: “I’m from White Plains. No, above the Bronx. I used to take the BQE to White Castle. I liked jogging across the Washington Bridge.” “My wife’s Nadine. I told her, ‘You go to a eatery [note: ‘a eatery’; dialogue is deliciously ungrammatical]. Don’t wait here.’” “Hello, I’m Mr. Meeks. Gloria’s just a friend. I don’t have much family left here in Los Angeles.” All I needed were the voices, really just the words, to imagine these people—not what they looked like but who they truly were or may have been. Perhaps these specks of speech dazzled me so brightly, just moments before receiving the blessed lethe of the Propofol syringe, because I was afraid and hopeful. As my characters are when they speak. As I am when I write. And what I am afraid of is silence. The best plays I’ve written, or the plays I’ve most enjoyed writing, have needed little or no cajoling. Their voices came unbidden, in whispers that grew insistently into a companionship of months or years. Admittedly my reception is irregular. I transcribe in fits and spurts. I speak for my characters as a place- holder; I grow confused. How do I know I’m hearing their voices and not my own? This is a delicate question. But do I like this talk, or bit of it, a lot? Does it impress me? Is it, as they say, “well-written”? Well then I must delete it. If a character says and keeps saying what I mean for him to say then I should disappear him from the play altogether. For some reason people still like to counsel young writers to “find their voice”; for me the practice of playwriting has always involved doing everything I can to lose my voice. My characters still sound like me, I know. I don’t think it can be helped. If not in the way I speak, then in the way I think and feel. We contain multitudes, but they are kindred.  

Jayne Ross  is the associate editor of the Scholar .

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I know it might sound like a stupid question but most of the t-shirts etc I have are american themed like saying 'Las Vegas' or ones that have american flags on them, I don't want to go over and offend anybody but its just the majority of my clothes have these themes?

Thanks in advance. Mark!

I don't think you will have an issue, maybe as previous posters have said leave the US flag t shirts at home as maybe someone who doesn't like the US may cause trouble. Personally it would probably just be a funny look but if worried don't wear it.

This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity.

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The Invention of Wings Sue Monk Kidd

The Invention of Wings essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd.

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The Invention of Wings Essays

The secret of wings: sue monk kidd's response to the american dream jared anthony ingram college, the invention of wings.

In America, according to the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal”. Unfortunately, this previous statement was not completely accurate in many ways concerning American citizens. The term “equality” is reserved to a specific...

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School Worker Jailed for Stealing Chicken Wings Worth $1.5m

Sky News, August 12, 2024

A school worker has been jailed for nine years after stealing $1.5m (£1.18m) worth of chicken wings.

Vera Liddell’s year-long heist of the flightless birds soared to 11,000 cases of the wings, which were meant for students during the height of the COVID pandemic, prosecutors say.

Vera Liddell

The 68-year-old started the scheme in July 2020 and was not found out until a business manager at her school near Chicago found that food costs were $300,000 (£235,000) over budget during a routine audit, according to US media reports.

Liddell bought up the huge amount of food and used a school cargo van to pick it up – students never saw a single wing.

Schools were closed at the time because of the pandemic, but the district was still sending out meal kits to pupils who were learning remotely.

Liddell, who was food service head for 10 years at the district, was originally charged with theft and operating a criminal enterprise.

She was handed a nine-year jail sentence after pleading guilty.

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You've reached your free article limit for this month. connect to your subscription or subscribe for full access, thanks for being a subscriber, why are we in ukraine.

Collages by Klawe Rzeczy. Source photographs: United States Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle on its way to Poland in support of NATO © Operation 2022/Alamy; Independence Monument in Kyiv © klug-photo/iStock; U.S. Marine Corps soldier © Michele Ursi/iStock; U.S. Marine Corps soldier and vehicle © Michele Ursi/iStock; Polish soldiers working with NATO allies © APFootage/Alamy; A member of a pro-Russian troop in an armored vehicle © Reuters/Alamy; An American soldier participates in a training exercise with NATO allies © APFootage/Alamy; Pro-Russian troops © Reuters/Alamy; Russian military leaders © Kremlin Pool/Alamy

From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia. Washington’s rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russia’s forces in the field; indirectly and otherwise, Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The United States has reportedly provided real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv, enabling Ukraine to sink a Russian cruiser, fire on soldiers in their barracks, and kill as many as a dozen of Moscow’s generals. The United States may have already committed covert acts of war against Russia, but even if the report that blames the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines on a U.S. naval operation authorized by the Biden Administration is mistaken, Washington is edging close to direct conflict with Moscow. Assuredly, the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, ever at the ready, are at a heightened state of vigilance. Save for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of a swift and catastrophic escalation in the nuclear face-off between these superpowers is greater than at any point in history.

To most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—the reasons for this perilous situation are clear. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy. To the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin’s paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War. Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational—someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest. Although the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power. To try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to “appease” Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after “every good-faith effort” by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue.

This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.

As the Soviets quit Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Cold War, they imagined that NATO might be dissolved alongside the Warsaw Pact. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev insisted that Russia would “never agree to assign [NATO] a leading role in building a new Europe.” Recognizing that Moscow would view the continued existence of America’s primary mechanism for exercising hegemony as a threat, France’s president Francois Mitterrand and Germany’s foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher aimed to build a new European security system that would transcend the U.S.- and Soviet-led alliances that had defined a divided continent.

Washington would have none of it, insisting, rather predictably, that NATO remain “the dominant security organization beyond the Cold War,” as the historian Mary Elise Sarotte has described American policy aims of the time. Indeed, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus within the United States soon embraced the idea that NATO, rather than going “out of business,” would instead go “out of area.” Although Washington had initially assured Moscow that NATO would advance “not one inch” east of a unified Germany, Sarotte explains, the slogan soon acquired “a new meaning”: “not one inch” of territory need be “off limits” to the alliance. In 1999, the Alliance added three former Warsaw Pact nations; in 2004, three more, in addition to three former Soviet republics and Slovenia. Since then, five more countries—the latest being Finland, which joined as this article was being prepared for publication—have been pulled beneath NATO’s military, political, and nuclear umbrella.

Initiated by the Clinton Administration while Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader in Russia’s history, NATO expansion has been pursued by every subsequent U.S. administration, regardless of the tenor of Russian leadership at any given moment. Justifying this radical expansion of NATO, the former senator Richard Lugar, once a leading Republican foreign policy spokesman, explained in 1994 that “there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery.” From the very beginning, then, the policy of NATO expansion was dangerously open-ended. Not only did the United States cavalierly enlarge its nuclear and security commitments while creating ever-expanding frontiers of insecurity, but it did so knowing that Russia—a great power with a nuclear arsenal of its own and an understandable resistance to being absorbed into a global order on America’s terms—lay at that “periphery.” Thus did the United States recklessly embark on a policy that would “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,” as the venerable American foreign policy expert, diplomat, and historian George F. Kennan had warned. Writing in 1997, Kennan predicted that this move would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

Russia repeatedly and unambiguously characterized NATO expansion as a perilous and provocative encirclement. Opposition to NATO expansion was “the one constant in what we have heard from all Russian interlocutors,” the U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas R. Pickering reported to Washington thirty years ago. Every leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every Russian foreign policy official since the end of the Cold War has strenuously objected—publicly as well as in private to Western diplomats—to NATO expansion, first into the former Soviet satellite states, and then into former Soviet republics. The entire Russian political class—including liberal Westernizers and democratic reformers—has steadily echoed the same. After Putin insisted at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATO’s expansion plans were unrelated to “ensuring security in Europe,” but rather represented “a serious provocation,” Gorbachev reminded the West that “for us Russians, by the way, Putin wasn’t saying anything new.”

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington’s NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests—or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington’s message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO’s writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other’s interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what’s reasonable and legitimate—not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its “unipolar moment,” Washington demonstrated—to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow—that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a “focus on relations within nations, on a nation’s form of governance, on its economic structure.”

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America “the indispensable nation”—and which Gorbachev said defined America’s “dangerous winner’s mentality”—it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states—and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values—the post–Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

Source photographs: Flags of Ukraine, Lithuania, the European Union, and NATO © Panther Media GmbH/Alamy; U.S. president Joe Biden © Ukraine Presidents Office/Alamy; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky © Geopix/Alamy; Russian president Vladimir Putin © Peter Cavanagh/Alamy

One early sign of this fundamental change was Washington’s covert, overt, and (perhaps most important) overtly covert interference in Russia’s affairs during the early and mid-Nineties—a project of political, social, and economic engineering that included funneling some $1.8 billion to political movements, organizations, and individuals deemed ideologically compatible with U.S. interests and culminated in American meddling in Russia’s 1996 presidential election. Of course, great powers have always manipulated both their proxies and smaller neighboring states. But by so baldly intervening in Russia’s internal affairs, Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered.

Moscow’s alarm over the hegemonic role America had assigned itself was intensified by what could fairly be characterized as the bellicose utopianism demonstrated by Washington’s series of regime-change wars. In 1989, just as the U.S.-Soviet global rivalry was ending, the United States assumed its self-appointed role as “the sole remaining superpower” by launching its invasion of Panama. Moscow issued a statement criticizing the invasion as a violation of “the sovereignty and honor of other nations,” but neither Moscow nor any other great power took any explicit action to protest the United States’ exercising its sway in its own strategic backyard. Nonetheless, because no foreign power was using Panama as a foothold against the United States—and thus Manuel Noriega’s regime posed no conceivable threat to America’s security—the invasion neatly established the post–Cold War ground rules: American force would be used, and international law contravened, not only in pursuit of tangible national interests, but also in order to depose governments that Washington deemed unsavory. America’s regime-change war in Iraq—declared “illegal” by U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan—and its wider ambitions to engender a democratic makeover in the Middle East demonstrated the range and lethality of its globalizing impulse. More immediately disquieting to Moscow, against the backdrop of NATO’s steady eastward push, were the implications of the U.S.-led alliance’s regime-change wars in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and, twelve years later, in Libya.

Although Washington presented the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as an intervention to forestall human rights abuses in Kosovo, the reality was far murkier. American policymakers presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that imposed conditions no sovereign state could accept: relinquish sovereignty over the province of Kosovo and allow free reign to NATO forces throughout Yugoslavia. (As a senior State Department official reportedly said in an off-the-record briefing, “[We] deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.”) Washington then intervened in a conflict between the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—a force that had previously been denounced by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization—and the military forces of the equally brutal regime of Slobodan Milošević. The KLA’s vicious campaign—including the kidnapping and execution of Yugoslav officials, police, and their families—provoked Yugoslavia’s equally vicious response, including both murderous reprisals and indiscriminate military actions against civilian populations suspected of aiding the insurgents. Through a stenographic process in which “ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility,” to quote a retrospective investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2001, this typical insurgency was transformed into Washington’s righteous casus belli. (A similar process would soon unfold in the run-up to the Gulf War.)

It was not lost on Russia that Washington was bombing Belgrade in the name of universal humanitarian principles while giving friends and allies such as Croatia and Turkey a free pass for savage counterinsurgencies that included the usual war crimes, human rights abuses, and forced removals of civilian populations. President Yeltsin and Russian officials strenuously, if impotently, protested the Washington-led war on a country with which Russia traditionally had close political and cultural ties. Indeed, NATO and Russian troops nearly clashed at the airport in Kosovo’s provincial capital. (The confrontation was only averted when a British general defied the order of his superior, NATO supreme commander U.S. general Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of Russian paratroopers, telling him: “I’m not going to start World War III for you.”) Ignoring Moscow, NATO waged its war against Yugoslavia without U.N. sanction and destroyed civilian targets, killing some five hundred non-combatants (actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers). The operation not only toppled a sovereign government, but also forcibly altered a sovereign state’s borders (again, actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers).

NATO similarly conducted its war in Libya in the face of valid Russian alarm. That war went beyond its defensive mandate—as Moscow protested—when NATO transformed its mission from the ostensible protection of civilians to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. The escalation, justified by a now-familiar process involving false and misleading stories pedaled by armed rebels and other interested parties, produced years of violent disorder in Libya and made it a haven for jihadis. Both wars were fought against states that, however distasteful, posed no threat to any NATO member. Their upshot was the recognition in both Moscow and Washington of NATO’s new power, ambit, and purpose. The alliance had been transformed from a supposedly mutual defense pact designed to repel an attack on its members into the preeminent military instrument of American power in the post–Cold War world.

Russia’s growing concern over Washington’s hegemonic ambitions has been reinforced by the profound shift, since the Nineties, of the nuclear balance in Washington’s favor. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia is the dominant fact of their relationship—a fact not nearly conspicuous enough in the current conversations about the war in Ukraine. Long after Putin, and irrespective of whether Russia is converted to a market democracy, the preponderance of each country’s nuclear missiles will be aimed at the other; every day, the nuclear-armed submarines of one will be patrolling just off the coast of the other. If they’re lucky, both countries will be managing this situation forever.

Throughout the Cold War, Russia and the United States both knew that a nuclear war was unwinnable—an attack by one would surely produce a cataclysmic riposte by the other. Both sides carefully monitored this “delicate balance of terror,” as the American nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter put it in 1959, devoting enormous intellectual resources and sums of money to recalibrating in response to even the slightest perceived alterations. Rather than attempting to maintain that stable nuclear balance, however, Washington has been pursuing nuclear dominance for the past thirty years.

Beginning in the early Aughts, a number of defense analysts—most prominently Keir A. Lieber, a professor at Georgetown, and Daryl G. Press, a professor at Dartmouth and a former consultant to both the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation—expressed concern about a convergence of strategic developments that have been under way since the dawn of America’s “unipolar moment.” The first was the precipitous qualitative erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities. Throughout the Nineties and Aughts, that decline primarily affected Russia’s monitoring of American ICBM fields, its missile-warning networks, and its nuclear submarine forces—all crucial elements to maintaining a viable deterrent. Meanwhile, as Russia’s nuclear capabilities decayed, America’s grew increasingly lethal. Reflecting the seemingly exponential progress of its so-called military-technological revolution, America’s arsenal became immensely more precise and powerful, even as it declined in size.

These improvements didn’t fit with the aim of deterring an adversary’s nuclear attack—which requires only the nuclear capacity for a “countervalue” strike on enemy cities. They were, however, necessary for a disarming “counterforce” strike, capable of preempting a Russian retaliatory nuclear response. “What the planned force appears best suited to provide,” as a 2003 RAND report on the U.S. nuclear arsenal concluded, “is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.”

This new nuclear posture would obviously unsettle military planners in Moscow, who had undertaken similar studies. They no doubt perceived Washington’s 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—about which Moscow repeatedly expressed its objections—in light of these changes in the nuclear balance, grasping that Washington’s withdrawal and its concomitant pursuit of various missile defense schemes would enhance America’s offensive nuclear capabilities. Although no missile defense system could shield the United States from a full-scale nuclear attack, a system could plausibly defend against the very few missiles an adversary might have left after an effective U.S. counterforce strike.

To Russian strategists, Washington’s pursuit of nuclear primacy was presumably still further evidence of America’s effort to force Russia to accede to the U.S.-led global order. Moreover, the means that Washington employed to realize that ambition would justifiably strike Moscow as deeply reckless. The initiatives the United States has pursued—advances in anti-submarine and anti-satellite warfare, in missile accuracy and potency, and in wide-area remote sensing—have rendered Russia’s nuclear forces all the more vulnerable. In such circumstances, Moscow would be sorely tempted to buy deterrence at the cost of dispersing its nuclear forces, decentralizing its command-and-control systems, and implementing “launch on warning” policies. All such countermeasures could cause crises to escalate uncontrollably and trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, mutually assured destruction provided decades of peace and stability. To remove the mutuality by cultivating overwhelming counterforce (i.e., first-strike) capabilities is—in another paradox—to court volatility and an increased likelihood of a grossly destructive nuclear exchange.

Since the nadir of Russian power in the decade and a half following the Soviet collapse, Russia has bolstered both its nuclear deterrent and, to a degree, its counterforce capabilities. Despite this, America’s counterforce lead has actually grown. And yet, U.S. leaders often act affronted when Russia makes moves to update its own nuclear capabilities. “From the vantage point of Moscow . . . U.S. nuclear forces look truly fearsome and they are,” Lieber and Press observe. The United States, they continue, is “playing strategic hardball in the nuclear domain, and then acting like the Russians are paranoid for fearing U.S. actions.”

Source photographs: NATO tank © Callum Hamshere/Alamy; A tank participating in a training exercise © APFootage/Alamy; NATO soldiers © DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy; NATO flag © Peter Probst/Alamy; Jets © Dario Photography/Alamy; Soldiers after disembarking from a U.S. Air Force plane © ZUMA Press/Alamy; NATO fighter jet © Matthew Troke/iStock

The same solipsism defined America’s assessment of what it insisted was the Russian menace to NATO. Despite Moscow’s persistent warnings that it regarded NATO expansion as a threat, the swollen alliance intensified its provocations. Beginning in the Aughts, NATO conducted massive military exercises in Lithuania and Poland—where it had established a permanent army headquarters—and, on Russia’s border, in Latvia and Estonia. In 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon was “reviewing and updating its contingency plans for armed conflict with Russia” and, in likely contravention of a 1997 agreement between NATO and Moscow, the United States offered to station military equipment in the territories of its Eastern European NATO allies, a move that a Russian general called “the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War.” The U.S. permanent representative to NATO explicitly identified “Russia and the malign activities of Russia” as NATO’s “major” target. The United States justified these moves as necessary responses to Russian hostilities in Ukraine and to the need, as the New York Times editorial board declared in a revival of Cold War rhetoric in 2018, to “contain” the “Russian threat.” And what made the Russians a threat? According to a 2018 report by the Pentagon, it was their intention to “shatter” NATO, the military pact arrayed against them.

While Russians of every political stripe have judged Washington’s enfolding of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliance’s expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic. Indeed, because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russia’s general apprehension about NATO’s push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance.

That view certainly reflected Russians’ intense and fraught cultural, religious, economic, historical, and linguistic ties with Ukraine. But strategic concerns were paramount. Crimea (the majority of whose people are linguistically and culturally Russian, and have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia) has been the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, since 1783. Since then, the peninsula has been Russia’s window onto the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the key to its southern defenses. Shortly after the Soviet Union’s breakup, Russia struck a deal with Ukraine to lease the base at Sevastopol. Up until its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia worried that, were Ukraine to join NATO, Moscow would not only have to surrender its largest naval base, but that base would perforce be incorporated into a hostile military pact, which happens to be the world’s most powerful military entity. The Black Sea would have become NATO’s lake.

Western experts have long acknowledged the unanimity and intensity of Russians’ fear of Ukraine joining NATO. In his 1995 study of Russian views on NATO expansion—which surveyed elite and popular opinion and incorporated off-the-record interviews with political, military, and diplomatic figures from across the political spectrum—Anatol Lieven, the Russia scholar and then Moscow correspondent for the Times of London, concluded that “moves toward NATO membership for Ukraine would trigger a really ferocious Russian response,” and that “NATO membership for Ukraine would be regarded by Russians as a catastrophe of epochal proportions.” Quoting a Russian naval officer, he noted that preventing NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and its consequent control of Crimea was “something for which Russians will fight.”

Given these views, Russia’s ground rules for Ukraine—the epitome of realpolitik—were plain. As Yeltsin’s 1999 diktat to Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma spelled out, Kyiv was not to enter into cooperative arrangements with, let alone join, NATO. Nor could Kyiv orient its foreign and economic relations toward the West in ways that disfavored Moscow. Yeltsin didn’t require Kyiv to orient its foreign or defense policies toward Moscow either. Understanding that NATO expansion couldn’t be reversed, Moscow’s vision of a lasting European security arrangement might have entailed varying degrees of arms limitations in the countries on NATO’s eastern glacis and a permanently neutral, eastern- and western-oriented status for Ukraine (somewhat like Austria’s Cold War status), including an agreement ruling out NATO membership. Washington fully grasped the cause and intensity of Moscow’s panic over the prospect of the West’s absorbing Ukraine into its orbit, as well as the diplomatic and security accommodations Russia required. But rather than attempting to reach a modus vivendi with Russia, U.S. officials continued to push for NATO expansion and supported color revolutions in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics as part of an apparent strategy to pull these areas out of Moscow’s orbit and embed them instead in Euro-Atlantic structures. By the second George W. Bush administration, Ukraine had emerged as the main arena of this competition.

Two critical events precipitated Russia’s war in Ukraine. First, at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, the U.S. delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. German chancellor Angela Merkel understood the implications of Washington’s proposal: “I was very sure . . . that Putin was not going to just let that happen,” she recalled in 2022. “From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.” America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, shared Merkel’s assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a classified email:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

NATO would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” Burns concluded. “Today’s Russia will respond.”

Appalled by Washington’s proposal, Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy were able to derail it. But the alliance’s “when, not if” compromise, which promised that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” was provocative enough. Attending negotiations toward the close of the summit regarding cooperation in transporting supplies to NATO’s forces in Afghanistan, Putin publicly warned that Russia would regard any effort to push NATO to its borders “as a direct threat.” Privately, he is reported to have advised Bush that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” Four months later, as Burns had forecast, Moscow—having concluded that NATO’s incorporation of Ukraine was inevitable—responded by launching a five-day war with Georgia. Moscow’s focus on securing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as opposed to embarking on a broader war of conquests, was consistent with Putin’s previous statements about what would happen if NATO threatened to expand farther east.

The second precipitating event came when Ukraine began talks about forming an “association agreement” with the European Union in September 2008 and, in October, applied for a loan from the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its economy after the global financial collapse. The association agreement, which eventually called for the “gradual convergence on foreign and security matters with the aim of Ukraine’s ever deeper involvement in the European security area,” would have precluded Ukraine from joining Moscow’s planned Eurasian Economic Union—a high priority for the Kremlin—while drawing Ukraine closer to the West. Plainly, the E.U. was seizing an opportunity to incorporate Ukraine into the West’s orbit, an outcome that Moscow had long defined as intolerable.

Ukraine’s pro-Moscow, democratically elected—though corrupt—president Viktor Yanukovych initially favored both the agreement with the E.U. and the IMF loan. But after U.S. and E.U. leaders began to effectively link the two in 2013, Moscow offered Kyiv a more attractive assistance package worth some $15 billion (and without the onerous austerity measures that Western aid would have imposed), which Yanukovych accepted. This course reversal led to the Euromaidan protests and ultimately to Yanukovych’s decision to flee Kyiv. Although much about these events remains unclear, circumstantial evidence points to the United States semi-covertly promoting regime change by destabilizing Yanukovych. A recording of a conversation between senior U.S. foreign policy official Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine suggests that they even attempted to manipulate the composition of the post-coup Ukrainian cabinet. (A former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and longtime anti-Russia hawk, Nuland is now under-secretary of state for political affairs and a key architect of Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine.) To Moscow, these episodes of political interference further demonstrated Washington’s intent to bring Ukraine into the Western camp.

In response to Yanukovych’s downfall, Russia—just as Putin had intimated at Bucharest—annexed Crimea and stepped up its support for Russian-speaking separatist rebels in the Donbas. Washington in turn accelerated its efforts to pull Kyiv into the Western orbit. In 2014, NATO started training roughly ten thousand Ukrainian troops annually, inaugurating Washington’s program of arming, training, and reforming Kyiv’s military as part of a broader effort to achieve—to quote the State Department’s 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership—Ukraine’s “full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” That aim, according to the charter, was linked to America’s “unwavering commitment” to the defense of Ukraine as well as to its eventual membership in NATO. The charter also asserted Kyiv’s claim to Crimea and its territorial waters.

By 2021, Ukraine’s and NATO’s militaries had stepped up their coordination in joint exercises such as “Rapid Trident 21,” which was led by the Ukrainian army with the participation of fifteen militaries and heralded by the Ukrainian general who co-directed it as intending to “improve the level of interoperability between units and headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO partners.” Given the weapons and training the Ukrainian military had absorbed, and given Washington’s and NATO’s newly explicit diplomatic, military, and ideological commitments to Kyiv, and—most important—given NATO’s sophisticated program to integrate Ukraine’s forces with its own, Ukraine could now justifiably be seen as a de facto member of the alliance. Thus Washington had demonstrated its willingness to cross what William J. Burns—now Biden’s CIA director—had fifteen years ago called “the brightest of all redlines.”

Beginning in early 2021, Russia responded by amassing forces on Ukraine’s border with the intention—plainly and repeatedly stated—of arresting Ukraine’s NATO integration. On December 17, 2021, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs conveyed to Washington a draft treaty that reflected Moscow’s long-standing security aims. A key provision of the draft stated: “The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics.” Other provisions proposed to bar Washington from establishing military bases in Ukraine and from engaging in bilateral military cooperation with Kyiv. A second draft treaty delivered to NATO called on the alliance to withdraw the troops and equipment it had been moving into Eastern Europe since 1997.

Far from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine (an impossible goal for the 190,000 troops that Russia eventually deployed in its initial attack on the country), all of Moscow’s demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward,” as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a press conference on January 14, 2022. “We are categorically opposed to Ukraine joining NATO,” Putin elaborated two days before invading Ukraine, “because this poses a threat to us, and we have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it.”

Even if Moscow’s avowals are taken at face value, Russia’s actions could be condemned as those of an aggressive and illegitimate state. At best those actions demonstrate Russia’s conviction that it has a claim to oversight of its smaller sovereign neighbors, a claim that accords with what Washington and the foreign policy cognoscenti condemn as a repellant concept: that of “spheres of influence.”

To be sure, any power imposing a sphere of influence is necessarily behaving in an implicitly aggressive manner. For a power to define an area outside its borders and impose limits on the sovereignty of the states within that area is contrary to the Wilsonian ideals that the United States has professed since 1917. In one of his last speeches as vice president, in 2017, Biden condemned Russia for “working with every tool available to them to . . . return to a politics defined by spheres of influence” and for “seek[ing] a return to a world where the strong impose their will . . . while weaker neighbors fall in line.” Because of America’s commitment to a just and moral world order, Biden insisted, quoting his own words from the Munich Security Conference in 2009, “we will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence. It will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.”

That straight-faced stance fails to recognize the spheres of influence, historically unprecedented in their sweep, that the United States claims for itself. Since promulgating the Monroe Doctrine two centuries ago, the United States has explicitly arrogated to itself a sphere of influence extending from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. But its globe-girdling sphere of influence also takes in the expanse, east to west, from Estonia to Australia and right up to the Asian mainland. Missing from the current discussion of the war in Ukraine, then, is any appreciation for how the United States would respond—and has responded—to foreign powers’ incursions into its own sphere of influence.

What, after all, would be America’s reaction if Mexico were to invite China to station warships in Acapulco and bombers in Guadalajara? For the past several years a civilian military analyst who has worked on international security issues with the Pentagon has put this question to the rising leaders in the U.S. military and intelligence services to whom he regularly lectures. Their reactions, he told us, range from cutting economic ties and exerting “maximal foreign policy pressure on Mexico to get them to change course” to “we need to start there, and then use military force if necessary,” revealing just how reflexively these military and intelligence professionals would defend America’s own sphere of influence.

Typifying the egocentrism that governs the U.S. approach to the world in general and relations with Russia in particular, not one of these future military and intelligence leaders has thought to connect, even in this past year, what they believe would be Washington’s response to the hypothetical situation in Mexico with Moscow’s reaction to NATO’s expansion and policy toward Ukraine. When the analyst has drawn those connections, the military and intelligence officers have been taken aback, in many cases admitting, as the analyst reports, “ ‘Damn, I never thought out what we’re doing to Russia in that light.’ ”

But America’s determination to uphold its own sphere of influence is more than hypothetical, as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated. Thanks to a misleading rendition of events that members of the Kennedy Administration fed to a credulous press and later reproduced in their memoirs, most Americans see that episode as an instance of America’s justified resolve when confronted by an unprovoked and unwarranted military threat. But Russia’s deployment of missiles in Cuba was hardly unprovoked. Washington had already deployed intermediate-range missiles in Britain, Italy, and, most provocatively, in a move that U.S. defense experts and congressional leaders had warned against, on Russia’s doorstep in Turkey. Moreover, during the crisis, it was American actions—not Russian or Cuban ones—that would be considered aggressive and illegal under international law.

The parallels between Ukraine and Cuba run deep. Just as Moscow has justified its war in Ukraine as a response to a foreign military threat emanating from a neighboring country, so Washington justified its bellicose and potentially calamitous reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba. Just as Ukraine, even before the Russian invasion, was well within its rights under international law to welcome NATO’s military support, so Cuba, as a sovereign state, had every right to accept the Soviet Union’s offer of missiles. Cuba’s acceptance was itself a legitimate response to aggression: The United States had been pursuing an illegal campaign of regime change against Cuba that included an attempted invasion, terrorist attacks, sabotage, paramilitary assaults, and a series of assassination attempts.

The United States may see Russia’s fear of NATO as unfounded and paranoid, and therefore incomparable to Washington’s reaction to the installation of intermediate- and medium-range nuclear missiles—armaments that President John F. Kennedy publicly declared were “offensive weapons . . . constitut[ing] an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas.” But as Kennedy acknowledged to his special security advisory committee on the first day of the crisis, “It doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara likewise conceded that the missiles did nothing to alter the nuclear balance. America’s allies, Bundy elaborated, were appalled that the United States would threaten nuclear war over a strategically insignificant condition—the presence of intermediate- and medium-range missiles in a neighboring country—with which those allies (and, for that matter, the Soviets) had been living for years. Summarizing the views of the majority of the advisory committee, Special Counsel Theodore C. Sorensen noted:

It is generally agreed that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.

Nevertheless, the United States deemed the strategically insignificant missiles an unacceptable provocation that jeopardized its tough-guy standing with its allies and adversaries, not to mention the Kennedy Administration’s electoral fortunes. (As McNamara acknowledged to the advisory committee on the very first day of the crisis: “I’ll be quite frank. I don’t think there is a military problem here . . . This is a domestic, political problem.”) Washington therefore embarked on an extreme, perilous course to force their removal, issuing an ultimatum to a nuclear superpower—an astonishingly provocative move, which immediately created a crisis that could easily have led to apocalyptic violence. Additionally, in imposing a blockade on Cuba—a gambit that we now know brought the superpowers within a hair’s breadth of nuclear confrontation—the administration initiated an act of war that contravened international law. The State Department’s legal adviser later recalled, “ Our legal problem was that their action wasn’t illegal.”

So much for President Biden’s avowal that the United States bases its policy on the conviction “that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.” In short, in a foreign policy episode celebrated for its righteousness and wisdom, the United States, within its self-defined sphere of influence, committed several acts of aggression and war against its neighbor, a sovereign state, and committed an act of war against its global rival in order to force both states to conform to its will. It did so because, justifiably or not, it deemed intolerable its neighbor’s internal arrangements and security relationship with a foreign great power. In the process, it brought the world closer to Armageddon than at any point in history.

At least until now. The point here is not to make arguments of moral equivalency. Rather, given that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to be—defensive alarm over an expansive rival’s military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor. To acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S. officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism.

To what degree would Washington even be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine? After all, a good deal of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have

ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to avoid mentioning.

By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome. Diplomacy requires an understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”

Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse.

Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases the risk of accidents and escalation.

The proxy war embraced by Washington today would have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow. Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise.

Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.

Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad” (that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).

Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again, the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact, Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved not by steadfastness but by compromise.

But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president, JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and “resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and circumstance.

Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic.

That pact has made permanent what Kennan called, in 1948, “the congealment of Europe” along the line created by the U.S.-Russian standoff. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has succeeded in pushing the borders of its own Iron Curtain “smack up to those of Russia” (as Kennan put it in 1997). By arousing Russian anxiety, it has heightened tension, conflict, and Russia’s most bellicose tendencies, thereby exposing both Europe and the United States to nuclear war. Depending on one’s point of view, membership in NATO entails either the prospect of sacrificing New York for Berlin (as the Cold War shibboleth held) or the prospect of “annihilation without representation” (as de Gaulle is reported to have put it). A new European security structure must therefore replace NATO.

This new system might embrace the notion of a community of Europe, but in reality the powerful states would exercise outsize influence (as they do in the E.U. and the U.N.). Such a system would in fundamental aspects resemble a modern Concert of Europe, in which the dominant states of the E.U., on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, acknowledge each other’s security interests, including their respective spheres of influence. In practice, this would mean, for example, that the Baltic states and Poland would enjoy the same large, but ultimately circumscribed, degree of sovereignty as, say, Canada does. It would also mean that, while Paris and Berlin won’t find Moscow’s internal arrangements to their taste, they will resume economic and trade relations with Russia and build on myriad other areas of common interest.

As for the future position of states such as Ukraine and Georgia, Europe’s (and Washington’s) approach would need to be similar to the approach that the diplomat Helmut Sonnenfeldt, while serving as a counselor at the State Department in 1976, advocated be taken toward the Soviet Union’s relations with its satellites:

a policy of responding to the clearly visible aspirations in Eastern Europe for a more autonomous existence within the context of a strong Soviet geopolitical influence.

Such an approach would reduce tension by recognizing Russia’s strategic interest in its sphere of influence, thereby inducing Moscow to exercise its claim of oversight in that sphere with as light a touch as possible.

Of course, whatever strategy Europeans work out regarding Moscow would and should be a matter entirely for Europeans to determine. Unavoidably, the pursuit of a new European security system—and the embrace of the old diplomacy that it would embody—would mean a substantially diminished global role for Washington. In allowing a Concert of Europe to act truly independently, Washington would effectively renounce the pursuit of global hegemony and the belief that its foreign policy should be guided by the conviction that, to quote President Clinton, it has a “particular contribution to make in the march of human progress.” In other words, the United States would accept that it would be what President Clinton promised it would not become, “simply . . . another great power.” Every post–Cold War president has recoiled from this role. But a more restrained and even pedestrian self-image might allow the United States at long last to pursue a more tolerant relationship with a recalcitrant world. “A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power,” wrote the journalist and foreign policy critic Walter Lippmann in April 1965, three months before the United States committed itself to a ground war in Vietnam.

It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous.

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 was formerly the national and literary editor of The Atlantic and the executive editor of World Policy Journal. 

 is the University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs and the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M University.

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Generative AI Legal Landscape 2024

• Aparna Sinha
• Ankit Tandon
• Jennifer Richards
• Megan Ma, Aparna Sinha, Ankit Tandon & Jennifer Richards, Generative AI Legal Landscape 2024, March 2024

Bringing new technology to the legal field has been difficult historically. This is because legal work relies heavily on complex legal language. However, recent advancements in Large Language Models that have increased language writing and understanding abilities have sparked a wave of interest and investment ($700 million in startup funding since early 2023).

Technical solutions like retrieval augmentation, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and guardrails have emerged to tackle technical hurdles like lack of accuracy, explainability and privacy protections. Despite the breakthroughs in technology, structural impediments persist, such as retrofitting automation to nuances like billable hours and lack of standardization.

Founders exploring the LegalTech sector should consider having co-founders with a deep legal expertise to help in navigating incumbents’ dominance over relationships, data assets and security and to target positioning as partners rather than competitors to incumbents. This is because incumbents are consolidating through acquisitions and partnerships rather than building internally, as seen in legal research, document processing and litigation.

Future opportunities may arise in specialized domains like IP and compliance as well as improvements in legal service operations. While generative AI drives momentum, the legal industry’s complexities warrant caution in terms of partner positioning and segment selection.

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Guest Essay

Katie Couric: Network Newscasts Need to Better Reflect America

By Katie Couric

Ms. Couric is a journalist and author and the founder of Katie Couric Media .

Norah O’Donnell recently announced that she will be stepping down as anchor of “CBS Evening News” after the election, after five years at the helm. I know her tenure must have been both exhilarating and challenging — seeing a network anchor wearing lipstick and earrings might still be slightly jarring to those viewers who assume that authority figures have to look like Walter Cronkite.

I cheered Ms. O’Donnell as she carried out her duties with intelligence and grace. I was proud of the fact that she tackled topics that were especially important to women, such as sexual assault in the military, and that her work helped prompt the Pentagon to institute wide-ranging reforms. I appreciated her focus on the long-term effects of Covid on women. I watched her interview powerful women chief executives and the four highest-ranking women in the military, all of whom were four-star generals and admirals. I knew viewers were seeing these stories because Norah was the driving force behind telling them.

The same week Ms. O’Donnell revealed she would be leaving the anchor desk to focus on conducting high-profile interviews for CBS, the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team was crushing it at the Paris Olympic Games. Like so many watching, I marveled at the incredible athleticism of these young women, as well as at their diversity. The team looked like America, and I found that exhilarating. Equally exciting was the fact that this was the first Olympics in history where there were as many women as men competing. We’ve come a long way. And I couldn’t stop watching an Instagram post of a 5-year-old Black gymnast on the balance beam in her living room, performing walkovers and dreaming of becoming an Olympian one day. Wow, I thought — this is why representation matters.

We’re also in the midst of a campaign that could result in the election of the first woman president, and first woman of color as president. It’s a potentially historic story — one that needs a diverse group of journalists covering it.

So it was more than a little disappointing to read that Ms. O’Donnell would be replaced by two men, John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. Don’t get me wrong: I know, like and respect these two journalists. But soon, on the big three networks, there will be four male anchors. Yes, the talented Margaret Brennan will be contributing stories from the Washington bureau for CBS, but the two people who will be greeting Americans watching the CBS evening newscast will be men.

More important, the three people behind the scenes, making most of the editorial decisions, will be three white men: Bill Owens, Guy Campanile and Jerry Cipriano. Mr. Cipriano was my right-hand writer during my tenure on “Evening News.” I loved working with him and he always had my back.

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