Speeches

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

“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.