Articles by: "Richard N. Haass"
Agonising over Afghanistan

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 …

Europe in disarray

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 …

The world George H.W. Bush made

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 inconvenient truth about Saudi Arabia

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 …

Defining diplomacy down

Some 25 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard professor who in the course of his career served as United States ambassador to the United Nations and a US senator from New York, coined the …

What the crisis in Venezuela reveals

The New York Times recently reported that US President Donald Trump’s administration had held meetings with rebellious Venezuelan military officers who were plotting to overthrow Nicolás Maduro’s government. In the end, US policymakers backed off …

The West must face reality in Turkey

Now that Turkey is at loggerheads with its erstwhile ally, the United States, the country’s currency crisis has morphed into a political problem of the first order. The immediate issue is Turkey’s refusal to release …

Summing up the Trump summits

US President Donald Trump’s summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki are history, as is the G7 summit in Quebec and the NATO summit in Brussels. …

The Singapore summit’s uncertain legacy

US President Donald Trump returned from his short summit meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in an exultant mood. ‘Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office’, Trump …

Missile strikes are not a Syria strategy

‘A perfectly executed strike…Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished.’ So tweeted US President Donald Trump just hours after more than a hundred American, French, and British cruise missiles hit three sites in …

Liberal world order, RIP

After a run of nearly one thousand years, quipped the French philosopher and writer Voltaire, the fading Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Today, some two and a half centuries …