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.