Quiz: Are You a Foreign Policy and History Genius?

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 23, 2026

Grab paper and pencil. Write down the numbers 1 through 10 and get ready to mark down next to them either “True” or “False.” Think I can trick you? Ten items follow. Which are true and which false? See the answers at the end.

1. The grandfather of the current leader of North Korea, the guy who ruled over North Korea from 1945 to 1994, was more of a Presbyterian than a Communist. Kim Il Sung was raised in a Christian community created by U.S. missionaries, was a Sunday School teacher and church organist, and leader of a Christian youth group. Kim Il Sung did not turn against Christianity so much as choose to himself play the role of Jesus in the story. He changed his name to take the name of a mythical messiah figure (Kim Il Sung), beating out Sun Myung Moon who had the same idea. Kim Il Sung encouraged beliefs in his supernatural powers. He was said to have performed miracles, to have known more as a child than the scholars, to heal with the touch of his hands, and to be especially fond of fishermen. He set aside a Sabbath-like day for worshipping him and learning his words as gospel. One could not take his name in vain or mistreat any image of him. Christian-like hymns praised his glory. Instead of 10 commandments, there were now 10 principles which included effectively that one would have no other gods besides Kim Il Sung. His mother became a Marylike figure. And, like at least one Trump staffer, some of Kim Il Sung’s family was said to have the power to teleport.

2. The nation far and away most often referred to as the richest country in the world, the United States, is not, and for a very long time has not been, and for the foreseeable future will not be the richest country in the world.

3. It was March 23, 1775, and a wealthy, white man who owned many people as slaves was giving a speech in a church in Richmond, Virginia. What he said was not recorded, but we know that he spoke critically of rule by England. An account just the next week by a man who had attended the speech tells us that the speaker called King George III, “a Tyrant, a fool, a puppet, and a tool.” This orator may have merely hinted at revolution, as on other occasions, or he may have openly advocated it. He also probably spoke on this day, as he did on others before and after, of the need to militarily suppress slave revolts and to resist any British efforts to free people from slavery, as well as of the need to attack Native Americans to the west, where this man was making a fortune on land speculation. Forty-two years later, a supposed text of the speech was published, having been concocted from decades-old memories solicited second-hand and probably some sheer invention. The original speaker had long since died. But now we learned that he had spoken against a metaphorical enslavement to England, and possibly even acted out liberating himself from invisible bondage. Words put into his mouth included these: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.” He, Patrick Henry, may or may not have actually said that, but there is no record of Patrick Henry subsequently risking death; he saw no combat action. He did, however, campaign against ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His rallying cry popularizing a war theretofore desired mostly by elites, is sufficient, however, to rank him as a heroic Founding Father of the United States of America. It is reported that in 1800 an enslaved man in Virginia named Gabriel, leading Gabriel’s Rebellion, at least planned to create a banner reading “death or liberty.” This is widely described as a reference to Patrick Henry’s speech even though it reverses the phrase, happened long before the speech was published, and involved someone actually in need of liberty and actually risking death. Gabriel has not been made into a founding father, but was hung by the neck.

4. Weeks before the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Japan, on July 13, 1945, Japan had sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. President Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Truman had already been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs had been dropped, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor. So, the desire to drop the bombs may have lengthened the war. The bombs did not end the war. The war ended six days after the second nuclear bombing, six days into the Russian invasion of Manchuria. But the war was going to end anyway, without either of those things. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War and, by his own account, to President Truman, prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard, prior to the bombings, urged that Japan be given a warning. Lewis Strauss, Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy, also prior to the bombings, recommended blowing up a forest rather than a city. General George Marshall apparently agreed with that idea. Atomic scientist Leo Szilard organized scientists to petition the president against using the bomb. Atomic scientist James Franck organized scientists who advocated treating atomic weapons as a civilian policy issue, not just a military decision. Another scientist, Joseph Rotblat, demanded an end to the Manhattan Project, and resigned when it was not ended. A poll of the U.S. scientists who had developed the bombs, taken prior to their use, found that 83% wanted a nuclear bomb publicly demonstrated prior to dropping one on Japan. The U.S. military kept that poll secret. General Douglas MacArthur held a press conference on August 6, 1945, prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, to announce that Japan was already beaten. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy said angrily in 1949 that Truman had assured him only military targets would be nuked, not civilians. “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender,” Leahy said. Top military officials who said just after the war that the Japanese would have quickly surrendered without the nuclear bombings included General Douglas MacArthur, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, General Curtis LeMay, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, Admiral Ernest King, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, and Brigadier General Carter Clarke. This was the view of seven of the United States’ eight five-star officers who received their final star in World War II or just after.

5. At least approximately a third of mass-shooters in the United States had been trained in shooting at U.S. taxpayer expense.

6. In 1938, representatives of 32 nations and 63 organizations publicly met in France with some 200 journalists covering the event. They discussed the Nazis’ desire to expel or kill Jews in Germany and Austria and decided to not accept their expulsion to anywhere in any significant numbers but to leave them to their fate. Only Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic even increased their immigration quotas. The decision was openly based on anti-Semitism. Australian delegate T. W. White said, without asking the native people of Australia: “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” The dictator of the Dominican Republic viewed Jews as racially desirable, as bringing whiteness to a land with many people of African descent. Land was set aside for 100,000 Jews, but fewer than 1,000 ever arrived. The conference was proposed by and chaired by a representative of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt who chose not to make any serious efforts to aid Jewish refugees, before, during, or after the conference. Foreign correspondent, columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne O’Hare McCormick described the “heartbreaking” scenes of long lines of Jews seeking visas from U.S. consulates while “waiting in suspense” for the outcome of this conference. She believed the world faced a fundamental “test of civilization.” Could America accept the moral guilt, McCormick asked, if Germany was allowed to continue with its blatant “policy of extermination” of the Jewish people? The U.S. Coast Guard chased a ship of Jewish refugees away from Miami. The State Department turned down the visa application of Anne Frank’s family. Congress rejected the Wagner-Rogers bill to admit more Jewish and non-Aryan refugees, but passed the Hennings Bill to allow unlimited numbers of British Christian children into the United States. A 1938 Gallup poll found that seventy-two percent of Americans believed “we should not allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany into the U.S.”

7. In the year 2000, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gave the government of Iran (slightly and obviously flawed) blueprints for a key component of a nuclear weapon, and planned to deliver parts as well. In 2006 James Risen wrote about this “Operation Merlin” in his book State of War. In 2015, the United States prosecuted a former CIA agent, Jeffrey Sterling, for supposedly having leaked the story to Risen. In the course of the prosecution, the CIA made public a partially redacted cable that showed that immediately after bestowing its gift on Iran, the CIA had begun efforts to do the same for Iraq. Risen claimed that the goal of Operation Merlin was to slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Yet we now know that the CIA had no solid knowledge that Iran had any nuclear weapons program, or if it had one how advanced it was. We know that the CIA had been involved in promoting the false belief that Iran was a nuclear threat since the early 1990s. But even assuming that the CIA believed Iran to have a nuclear weapons program in 2000 (which the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate would later claim had been ended in 2003), we have not been offered any explanation of how providing flawed blueprints could have been imagined to slow such a program down. If the idea is supposed to be that Iran or Iraq would simply waste time building the wrong thing, we run up against two problems. First, they would likely waste vastly more time if working without plans, as compared to working with flawed ones. Second, the flaws in the plans given to Iran were obvious and apparent. When the former-Russian assigned to deliver the blueprints to the Iranian government immediately spotted the flaws in them, the CIA told him not to worry. But they didn’t tell him that the flawed plans would somehow slow down an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Instead they told him that the flawed plans would somehow reveal to the CIA how far along Iran’s program was. But how that would happen has never been explained either. And it conflicts with something else they told him, namely that they already knew how far along Iran was and that Iran already had the nuclear knowledge that they were providing. My point is not that these assertions were true but that the slow-them-down rationale was not even attempted. One never wants to underestimate incompetence. The CIA knew next to nothing about Iran, and by Sterling’s account was not seriously trying to learn. By Risen’s account, around 2004 the CIA accidentally revealed to the Iranian government the identities of all of its agents in Iran. But incompetence does not seem to explain a consciously thought-out effort to distribute nuke plans to designated enemies. What does seem to explain it better is the desire to point to the possession of those plans, or of the product of those plans, as evidence of a hostile threat of “weapons of mass destruction,” which, as we all know, was treated as an acceptable excuse for a war. When Jeffrey Sterling went to Congress to reveal the giving of nuclear plans to Iran, Congress Members in various cases ignored him, suggested that he move to Canada, or died before doing anything.

8. After the murderous crimes of 9-11, the government of Russia gave the United States an enormous memorial to express its sorrow and sympathy. Vladimir Putin attended the groundbreaking as the giant memorial was erected nearby the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

9. On December 7/8, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. colonies of the Philippines and Guam, plus the U.S. territories of Hawaii, Midway, and Wake, as well as the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, Honk Kong, and the independent nation of Thailand. This attack, later misleadingly called simply “Pearl Harbor,” followed years of build-up to war by the U.S. and Japanese governments, with peace advocates demonstrating against and working to avoid the looming war for several years — including 10,000 protesters marching up Fifth Avenue. Also prior to the attack, the U.S. government created the draft (and saw major draft resistance, and locked draft resisters up in prisons), activated the National Guard, supplied planes and trainers and pilots and money to China for war against Japan (making sure Japan knew about it), imposed harsh sanctions on Japan, advised the U.S. military that a war with Japan was beginning, and ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States. On December 4, 1941, newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, published President Roosevelt’s plan for war against Germany and Japan. U.S. officials had worried for months about a possible attack on Pearl Harbor. On November 15, 1941, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media: “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” he said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret. Marshall told Congress in 1945 that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-U.S. agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect before December 7. On November 25, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that he’d met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly the next Monday, December 1, 1941. “The question,” Stimson wrote, “was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.”

10. When Philip Zimbardo planned the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which young men supposedly became vicious and cruel simply because they were assigned the role of pretend prison guards, he coached the would-be guards in cruelty and intended to write a report about the reactions of those playing the role of prisoners. Only after the fact did he decide to depict the guards’ sadism as unsolicited and to pretend to have been surprised by it, switching the subject of his report from the prisoners to the guards, which may be why attempts to recreate the experiment with even remotely similar results have all failed.

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ANSWERS

1. True.
2. True.
3. True.
4. True.
5. True.
6. True.
7. True.
8. True.
9. True.
10. True.

Did you get them all right?