US President Donald Trump has labelled himself a wartime president, and many other leaders around the world are using similar language. It’s a description that raises an obvious question: what do the history and nature …
Articles by: "Richard N. Haass"
After nearly two decades, 2,400 American soldiers killed, another 20,000 wounded and as much as US$2 trillion spent, the United States is understandably eager to withdraw from Afghanistan. President Donald Trump wants to be able …
Enough time has passed to read and digest all 180-plus pages of what the US government calls ‘Peace to prosperity: A vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people’. It’s also referred …
It was 5 August 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded and conquered all of Kuwait, and US President George H.W. Bush could not have been clearer as he spoke from the South …
Until just a few years ago, it looked as if the problem posed by nuclear weapons had been successfully managed, if not solved. American and Russian nuclear stockpiles had been reduced substantially from their Cold …
There are several reasons why US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American forces from northern Syria, and leave the region’s Kurds vulnerable to neighbouring Turkey’s military incursion, was a terrible one. The Kurdish forces …
Nearly everyone has seen the dramatic images of the Amazon ablaze. Tens of thousands of fires—intentionally started or caused by logging, farming, mining and other human activities—have broken out over the past year alone. This …
‘Tilt’ is a word with a history in South Asia. Nearly half a century ago, Pakistan’s government brutally repressed its citizens in the eastern part of the country. Millions of refugees streamed into India, which …
History at any moment can be understood as a snapshot, telling us where we are, or as a moving picture, telling us not just where we are but where we have been and where we …
US President Donald Trump’s administration has singled out Iran—even more than Russia, China or North Korea—with sustained pressure over the past two and a half years. The United States has withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear …
It has been nearly 60 years since the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn wrote his influential book The structure of scientific revolutions. Kuhn’s thesis was simple but heretical: breakthroughs in science occur not through the …
Much of lasting significance happened in 1979. There was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s Islamic revolution, which brought to power a regime set on remaking not just Iranian society but also much of …