Mr. Asadi is an Iranian journalist living in France. He is the winner of the 2011 Human Rights Book Award for Letters to My Torturer: Love, Revolution, and Imprisonment in Iran. He spent time imprisoned in Iran both before and after the 1979 revolution.

Bill Guttentag is a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He and Dan Sturman directed the documentary film "Nanking", which won a Peabody Award in 2009.

Robert J. Samuelson is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Louis René Beres, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue, was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). He is currently examining previously unexplored connections between human death fears and world politics. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, Professor Beres is the author of ten books, and several hundred articles, on international relations and international law. He is a regular contributor to the OUPblog.

Oddly, perhaps, there are striking similarities between Western Epicureanism and Eastern Buddhism. Even a cursory glance at Lucretius, On The Nature of Things, reveals a characteristically “Buddhist” position on human oneness and human transience. Greek and Roman Stoicism, too, share this animating concept, a revealing vision of both interpersonal connectedness and civilizational impermanence.

But what has this understanding to do with current world affairs, especially patterns of globalization and interdependence? Consider that in their common passage from the ethereal to the corporeal, Epicureanism, Stoicism and Buddhism all acknowledge one great and indissoluble bond of everlasting being, an essential and harmonious conflation of self and world. While each instructs that the death of self is meaningless, even a delusion, all also agree that the commonality of death can overcome corrosive divisions. This recognized commonality can provide humankind with authentically optimal sources of global cooperation. Whether or not we can ever get beyond our fear of death, it is only this commonality that can ultimately lift us above planetary fragmentation and explosive disunity.

For political scientists, economists, and other world affairs specialists, such a “molecular” view can open new opportunities for the expanding study of globalization and international relations. Rather than focus narrowly on more traditional institutions and norms, this neglected perspective can now offer scholars a chance to look more penetratingly behind the news. The outer world of politics and statecraft is often a reflection of our innermost private selves....

Excerpted from “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage” by Jeffrey Frank. Copyright © 2013 by Jeffrey Frank. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech — delivered just five days after the New York Post reported wealthy backers had set up a fund for his day-to-day expenses — was seen by some 58 million people, or about a third of the population of the United States. It lasted thirty minutes and was to be forever identified by its reference to a cocker spaniel named Checkers. It was like nothing ever seen in American politics, set apart by its intimacy, its pathos, the apparent revelation of a private life from a public man, and its use of television. Its structure was a trial lawyer’s closing (or, perhaps, opening) argument, which ranged from the explanatory to the exculpatory to the defiant; buried within it was not only Nixon’s defense of himself, but occasional jabs at his opponents and probably at General Dwight Eisenhower, his running mate. It is still a remarkable document....

Nixon at first had no real sense of what he’d just done, because no one had ever done it before, but it did not take long for him to realize that perhaps he needn’t despair; as he left the El Capitan, he was cheered by people who’d been waiting outside. And even without a proper address for the Republican National Committee, telegrams were already coming in at the rate of about four thousand an hour. Loie Gaunt, who worked on Nixon’s Senate staff, was helping out at the Washington Hotel and, after the speech, she stayed put, answering calls from people who told her that they’d been moved.

A positive consensus quickly appeared, much of it close to the somewhat conditional view of the Herald Tribune, whose editorial insisted that the final decision rested with General Eisenhower and, while not affirming full support of Nixon, now said that he “will emerge from this ordeal … not only as a better known but as a bigger man than before.” But there were dissenters — “this mawkish ooze ill became the role of a man who might become President,” one paper said — and even Nixon’s allies found something unsettling about the performance. One might have said of him, as Trollope wrote of the lawyer Mr. Samuel Dockwrath, “He talked well and to the point, and with a tone of voice that could command where command was possible, persuade where persuasion was required, mystify when mystification was needed, and express with accuracy the tone of an obedient humble servant when servility was thought to be expedient.”...

The writer is the director of the Yad Vashem Libraries, author of Approaching the Holocaust, Texts and Contexts, Vallentine Mitchell, 2005 and Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front, soon to be published by Yad Vashem and University of Nebraska Press.

In January 1943 there were only 60,000 Jews left in the Warsaw Ghetto.

They were what remained of the approximately 440,000 Jews who had been confined there. One-fifth had died of disease and starvation during the past two years, and the previous summer some 265,000 had been deported to the Treblinka extermination camp, and over 30,000 to other camps.

At the start of the great deportation, the head of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, had committed suicide rather than comply with German demands to provide census information about the ghetto, realizing the Germans would use it for the coming Aktion. His death, however, did nothing to stop the trains from rolling out of Warsaw.

With Czerniakow dead, in the wake of the deportations a new de facto leadership emerged in the ghetto – the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), headed by Mordecai Anielewicz. The ZOB was a coalition primarily of various Zionist youth movements and the Jewish socialist Bund.

Alongside it there was a smaller armed underground group, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) which represented the Revisionist Zionists.

ON MONDAY, January 18, 1943, 70 years ago, German forces entered the ghetto to round up Jews for transport...

Howard W. French is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa and Disappearing Shanghai. He is completing a forthcoming book about China and Africa, titled Haphazard Empire. He teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

When Rwandan-backed rebels recently took Goma, the biggest city in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Paul Kagame had every reason to think the world would give him a pass. That, after all, has been the pattern for years.

Frequently lauded by people such as Bono, Tony Blair, and Pastor Rick, the Rwandan president enjoys some extraordinary backing in the West—support that is particularly remarkable given his alleged hand in ongoing regional conflicts believed to have killed more than 5 million people since the mid-’90s.

On the aid and awards circuit, Kagame is known as the man who led Rwanda from the ashes of the 1994 genocide—one of the late 20th century’s greatest atrocities—to hope and prosperity: a land of fast growth and rare good economic governance with enviable advances in health care, education, and women’s rights. Bestowing his foundation’s Global Citizen Award on Kagame three years ago, Bill Clinton said: "From crisis, President Kagame has forged a strong, unified, and growing nation with the potential to become a model for the rest of Africa and the world."

But that model narrative seems to be shifting in the aftermath of the Goma takeover. After a United Nations report found that Rwanda created and commands the rebel group known as M23, important European friends such as Britain and Belgium partially suspended aid donations to Rwanda, and President Obama called Kagame to warn him against any continued military adventurism.

Leading observers say the reevaluation of Kagame and his legacy is long overdue...

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston. His most recent books are Albert Camus: Elements of a Life and France and Its Empire Since 1870 (with Alice Conklin and Sarah Fishman).

Words, if not history, are repeating themselves in France. Following the French government's dispatch of planes and troops last week to Mali, whose government is besieged by Islamist rebels, a particular phrase -- l'union sacrée -- has been resurrected. Forged nearly a century ago, those two words nevertheless cast light on the future of France's current military intervention.

When President François Hollande announced last Friday that he had ordered the Mali operation, leading politicians quickly hailed his decision. "Sacred union" immediately became the phrase du jour of the French media. The conservative paper Le Figaro welcomed the "sacred union of the political class" -- a sentiment and wording echoed by the centrist Le Parisien and liberal Le Monde. One of the leaders of the main opposition party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), declared that such a union was "not an option, but an absolute necessity and duty for us all." Even Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing Front National, rallied to the government's decision.

This orgy of bonding among inveterate enemies happens to be taking place on the eve of the centennial anniversary of the phrase's birth. The occasion, predictably, was an earlier war -- the war, you may recall, meant to end all wars. On Aug. 3, 1914, President Raymond Poincaré declared that France was going to battle against Germany. "Heroically defended by all her sons," he affirmed, the nation's "sacred union will never be shattered in the face of the enemy."

The phrase lives on, in large measure, because the political, social, and ideological contexts that created it never truly died. Sacred Union 2.0, it turns out, looks a lot like Sacred Union 1.0... 

Mr. Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent of Fox News and the author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.

Either by design or through incompetence, the Obama administration’s war on terror has become indefinable. In fact, to the degree that there are identifiable policies, they seem either internally contradictory or at odds with other administration policies.

THE INHERITED PROTOCOLS

What is the current Obama position on the so-called Bush-era war-on-terror protocols? Are they still useful in stopping terrorists, irrelevant, toxic, or sort of all three? The administration has never given us an explanation of its attitude toward the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, the use of military tribunals, the exact status of renditions, the use of preventive detention, and the employment of the Patriot Act, especially wiretaps and intercepts.

To the extent that anyone could define the present anti-terrorism policy, it might be paraphrased along the following lines: “We rejected these protocols when, as outside critics, there was partisan advantage in doing so. But after assuming office, we found them useful, embraced most of them and even expanded some, preferred to ignore that about-face, assumed that the global and the domestic Left would not object any longer — given that their opposition was more to Bush than to his policies per se — and wish to continue these measures even as we keep quiet about them.”...