Speeches

We live in an age of discontinuities.  Internationally, at least, the past and present no longer serve as reliable guides to the future.  Our expectations are regularly shown to be unrealistic.  It’s clear that we misperceive the present as often as we comprehend it.

I’m honored to share a very brief moment with you tonight. I crossed the Atlantic to be here for two reasons. 

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

We live in what the National Security Agency [NSA] has called “the golden age of SIGINT [signals intelligence].” We might have guessed this. We now know it for a fact because of a spectacular act of civil disobedience by Edward Snowden.

Many years ago, surveying an apparently collapsing China, Mao Zedong coolly observed that there was “great disorder under the Heavens and the situation is excellent.”  By this, he meant that the disappearance of the old order offered the opportunity to build a new one.  In many ways, our world’s

Prince Turki Al-Faisal, chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, addressed the 22nd annual policymakers' conference of the National Council on US Arab Relations with typical eloquence and bluntness.

I come before you this morning at this important conference with many questions and no answers.

I’m here to speak to you about the United States, the Middle East, and China.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has more to recall than to anticipate. Like everyone else in this room today, I keep striving to reach that point and falling short. I can’t help looking to the future, because that's where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.

It is a privilege to have been asked to join this discussion of Jacob Heilbrunn’s