Foreign policy doctrines are as American as apple pie, and as old as the Republic. Start with George Washington’s Farewell Address: The “great rule” in dealing with other nations was to extend “our commercial relations” and “to have with them as little political connection as possible.” So stay out of Europe, and keep Europe away from us.

What the American Founders can teach

In 1921, Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration staged a campaign to battle a devastating famine in Soviet Russia. Hoover fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude examines a little-known chapter in the history of American-Soviet relations.

The French writer Jacques Benoist-Méchin never quite repented of his enthusiasm for his Nazi masters. A new glimpse at a complex personality. By David Jacobs.

Fidel Castro may look like a blundering madman, but instead he’s calculating and entirely rational. Hoover fellow William Ratliff on a tyrant who “knows exactly what he is doing.”

The Western media tell us that China’s leaders haven’t changed much in the past twenty years, and they may well be right. What has changed is the China around them. By Hoover media fellow William McGurn.

Woody West on The First World War by John Keegan and Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-18 by Byron Farwell

Peter Berkowitz on Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff

Permanent refugees, generation after generation: these are the fruit of a U.N. agency that blocks both peace and a Palestinian state. By Michael S. Bernstam.