The German question has returned, along with the greatest foreign policy issue facing Americans regarding the European balance of power.

Daily protests in Hong Kong have been going on for more than two months, leading a top Chinese official to declare that the city is experiencing its worst crisis since the former British colony returned to China in 1997.

In Safe Passage, Kori Schake details how transitions in geopolitical power lead to violence, except when the United States slowly and peacefully took over the hegemonic role Great Britain played.

Last month Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—” was scrubbed from a mural at Manchester University because students believed that Kipling stood “for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights.” But his “The Ballad of East and West” can hardly be racism.