Taking a formal course in European History has considerably impacted my rereading of the articles by Pfaff and Stern. Not that that it has changed the point of view with which I was left when I first read the articles; rather, it has intensified and somewhat broadened my perception of the issues each of the authors brings about. For example, it has lent a sense of fatality to Stern’s words, a sense of inevitability, which I had not perceived before. His evoking history as a means of understanding the present, and his saying that “We are in the age faced with national security, worldwide terrorism and new orthodoxies [,] But [that] these new developments are very much based on the old frameworks.”, led me to – based on some notions I learned in class – infer that each actor in the arena of international relations actually learns very well from history, provided that it is its own history, and that for this reason, future catastrophes are inevitable. The example I believe best illustrates this proposition is the recent war waged on Iraq. What I have learned from the European History course is that the USA does not have a long history of great human losses and of anguish imposed by past wars, and will therefore engage in markedly belligerent and realist actions for as long as that history remains unchanged. In addition to that, I now have the impression that the two articles are deeply related, as if one were the second page of the other. With a sense of perspective kept on the article by Stern as well as on the knowledge I gained on imperialism, I now regard Pfaff’s discussion on the subject of American hegemony as a modern example of how an empire would begin in our days, and more important, of how it would end. In other words, an empire in our days would not be exempt from going through the same phases as all the other empires, destruction phase included.