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 …
Articles by: "Richard N. Haass"
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 The United States has withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear …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 …
After more than 17 years, the time has come to accept two important truths about the war in Afghanistan. The first is that there will be no military victory by the government and its American …
It was not all that long ago—just a few years, as hard as that it is to believe—that Europe appeared to be the part of the world most closely resembling the end-of-history idyll depicted by …
I have worked for four US presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, and perhaps the most important thing I have learned along the way is that little of what we call history is inevitable. What happens …
The 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth highlights former US vice president Al Gore’s efforts to alert his fellow Americans to the perils of global warming. What made the truth inconvenient is that avoiding catastrophic climate …