Decolonisation

Aquino paid off Marcos's inherited debt early to restore Philippine credit, then pushed land reform that spared her own family's estate the redistribution she imposed on everyone else.

The man who freed Mandela and shared his Nobel Prize spent his final years defending remarks about apartheid that his own foundation had to retract.

A referendum on his own presidency reportedly passed almost unanimously, and a historian who studied it concluded the result was likely falsified without being able to say by how much, which sums up how hard Nasser's record is to read straight.

The institutions he built outlasted the specific decisions, from Kashmir to the 1962 war with China, that historians now judge far more harshly than his contemporaries did.

Twenty-seven years in prison did not soften his politics so much as narrow his focus to the one outcome he judged worth negotiating for.

Cuba sent thirty-six thousand troops to Angola on its own initiative and caught Moscow by surprise, a rare instance of a Cold War proxy acting well ahead of its patron.

Four years of negotiation nearly collapsed twice, once after a massacre and once after an assassination, and the second crisis pushed the parties together rather than apart.

Roosevelt built the United Nations around a partnership between four great powers he did not live to see tested, and the Cold War tested it almost immediately.

1997

Sukarno declared independence on a borrowed typewriter within hours of Japan's surrender, wording it so ambiguously that Japan and Indonesia could read the same sentence as meaning entirely different things.

Britain forcibly relocated a million Malayan villagers, used a herbicide the Americans would later study for Vietnam, and still calls the counterinsurgency that resulted a doctrinal success.

1965

A ten-year guerrilla war Portugal never won on the battlefield ended instead when its own soldiers overthrew the government in Lisbon that kept sending them to fight it.

1974

Rhodesia's white minority government fought fifteen years to avoid the majority rule it eventually accepted at a negotiating table it had spent the entire war refusing to sit at.

A guerrilla war fought by Tutsi exiles trying to go home hardened, over four years of stalled peace talks, into the conditions for the genocide that overtook it.

1957