Speeches

We have entered a world in which, as William Butler Yeats put it in 1919:

The United States and Iran are divided by vivid memories of reciprocally inflicted trauma and the insistent pleading of mutually antagonistic client states in the Middle East.  Each has demonized the other.  The political costs to leaders in each country of reaching out to the other are immediate

“One belt, one road” (OBOR) was a slogan before it became a concept in search of content. It is now evolving into many plans and projects, some of them with huge implications.

I have been asked to speak about the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East, the realignments occurring among states there, and the prospects for the achievement of renewed stability in the region.

Since the end of the Cold War, we’re had a lot of very instructive experience in the Middle East.  Back in 2010, I compiled the real-time analyses I had made of our policies and their results in a book titled

I am delighted to join Professor Carla Freeman here this evening.  I admire her as a scholar even as I remember her as a remarkably muscular and willful infant, gifted student and ballerina, and the beautiful young woman whom I gave away in marriage when she was twenty-three.  Carla is my eld

The dominant features of Chinese politics in this decade have been the rise of Xi Jinping, the return of repressive autocracy, and an inconclusive effort to re-engineer China’s economic model.

I’m here to talk about the end of the American empire. But before I do I want to note that one of our most charming characteristics as Americans is our amnesia. I mean, we are so good at forgetting what we’ve done and where we did it that we can hide our own Easter eggs.

Sometime between 460 and 450 B.C.E., Herodotus wrote The Persian Wars, his account of the Greeks' two wars with the Persians, which spanned thirteen years. Even in a time when trends and events unfolded more slowly than they seem to now, that was a famously lengthy conflict.

This is the third of three lectures on the United States’ global role in the 21st century.