Speeches

A hundred and fifty years ago, a German physicist derived the concept of “entropy” from the second law of thermodynamics.  Since then, entropy has stood for the idea that everything in the universe eventually moves from order to disorder, from structure to formlessness, and from predictabili

I’m Chas Freeman. In 2003, I helped found what became the Committee for the Republic, which I continue to chair. The founders of this group were of disparate political persuasions.

On January 20, Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States. He will confront a changed world. We are only two-fifths of the way through the interval between the election and the inauguration, but the ebb in deference to American global leadership is already unmistakable.

Alexander the Great is said to have declared that "logisticians are a humorless lot … they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay."  He was the one of the first strategists to understand the importance of connectivity and also to point out that there are not a lot of jokes

Chris has asked me to lay out the foreign policy issues the next president will face upon taking office this coming January.   If you go by what each candidate has said,  she or he just needs to kill a few foreign leaders and renegotiate some alliances and trade deals.  But there are some ot

In just four weeks, as the press never tires of pointing out, Americans will elect “a new commander-in-chief.”  But no one claims that we will elect a president able to govern, even if she or he commands our uniquely powerful military establishment.  There is almost no rea

I’m a retired diplomat.  The late Arthur Goldberg, who served on our Supreme Court and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, once said that “diplomats approach every question with an open . . .

In some ways, Turkey has a better claim than China to be the “the middle kingdom.”  Ankara sits at the center of a vast web of geopolitical relationships, most of which interact with each other as well as with it, but all of which can be seriously perturbed by changes in Turkish policy.  Turkey’s

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