Fri | Oct 10, 2025

Stories by Richard Haass for Project Syndicate

Published:Wednesday | September 3, 2025 | 9:39 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: “Ripeness is all” opined Edgar in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Everyone would do well to keep this in mind amid diplomatic efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Rarely in history is one side able to end a war...

Published:Wednesday | July 2, 2025 | 9:13 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: We are now in the third phase of the current crisis in the Middle East. In the previous two phases, the initiative was with Israel and then the United States. Now it has passed to Iran. To recap: In the first phase, Israel, concerned that...

Published:Wednesday | June 18, 2025 | 8:49 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: In its air strikes across Iran, Israel reportedly killed senior military leaders as well as prominent figures in the country’s nuclear programme. It also appears that Israel further degraded Iranian air defences, struck additional...

Published:Wednesday | June 11, 2025 | 8:03 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump’s second administration is barely four months old, but already there are signs of an emerging foreign policy doctrine. And like so much else about his presidency, it represents a striking departure from the...

Published:Wednesday | April 30, 2025 | 5:24 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK :This is hardly a golden era of diplomacy. A ceasefire – let alone a lasting peace – between Russia and Ukraine remains a distant possibility, and neither Israel nor Hamas seems to view a long-term truce in Gaza as a priority....

Published:Wednesday | January 15, 2025 | 7:25 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: All US presidents leave mixed legacies. The best make mistakes, and the worst get some things right. But Joe Biden’s legacy is more mixed than most, if only because he got some big things mostly right and some big things mostly...

Published:Wednesday | August 28, 2024 | 8:33 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: Mention “proliferation” and most people will assume that you are talking about the spread of nuclear weapons. For good reason. Nine countries (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United States, and...

Published:Wednesday | July 24, 2024 | 8:38 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: US President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate this fall has transformed American politics. It caps a historic July in the United States, one defined by far-reaching Supreme...

Published:Wednesday | July 3, 2024 | 7:47 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: The first – and potentially only – debate between the 45th and 46th presidents of the United States constituted a clear win for Donald Trump, as far more viewers focused on Joe Biden’s apparent physical and mental...

Published:Wednesday | May 29, 2024 | 7:25 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: Three months ago, I wrote a column titled 'Will Ukraine Survive?' The answer (thankfully) for the next year is “yes,” owing to Ukraine’s willingness to fight and sacrifice and the resumption of substantial US...

Published:Wednesday | February 21, 2024 | 9:07 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a senior counsellor at Centerview Partners and the author of The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens (Penguin Press, 2023) and the weekly newsletter Home...

Published:Wednesday | January 3, 2024 | 8:42 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: In my old job at the US State Department, colleagues often asked me what was likely to happen in this or that situation. Often, there was no way of knowing, and I reminded questioners that I was Director of Policy Planning, not of...

Published:Wednesday | December 27, 2023 | 9:15 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: The advantage historians have over journalists is that the passage of time offers them a perspective not available to those with immediate deadlines. But the year is about to end, which constitutes a firm deadline if the goal is to put...

Published:Wednesday | December 6, 2023 | 9:04 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: It is difficult to imagine the world without Henry Kissinger, not simply because he lived to be 100 years old, but because he occupied an influential – and sometimes dominant – place in American foreign policy and...

Published:Wednesday | November 22, 2023 | 7:48 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: Summits are by definition occasions of high politics and drama, so it comes as little surprise that the November 15 meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping generated immense global interest. It was a useful...

Published:Wednesday | October 11, 2023 | 8:01 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: The history of Israel has often been a history of conflict. A partial list includes the 1948 Arab-Israeli War that followed Israel’s birth; the Israeli-British-French attempt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal and topple Egypt’s...

Published:Wednesday | September 27, 2023 | 8:29 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: There is an old Soviet joke in which a journalist asks the General Secretary of the Communist Party to assess the country’s economy. “Good” is the short answer. The journalist implores the leader to elaborate so he can...

Published:Wednesday | June 28, 2023 | 5:29 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: The leader of an authoritarian country with enormous energy reserves builds up his armed forces along the border of a weaker neighbour, one he claims has no right to exist as an independent country. He then proceeds to launch an invasion...

Published:Tuesday | March 21, 2023 | 11:02 PMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: One advantage that historians have over journalists concerns time, not so much in the sense that they are free from urgent deadlines, but that they have the deeper perspective conferred by the years – or decades – between...

Published:Tuesday | February 28, 2023 | 7:32 PMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

MUNICH: In the year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has evolved in ways few predicted. The conventional wisdom was that Russian forces would quickly overwhelm the overmatched Ukrainians and take possession of much...

Published:Wednesday | February 1, 2023 | 8:22 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: For more than three-quarters of a century, the United States has played an outsized, constructive role in the world. To be sure, there have been major errors, including the Vietnam War and the 2003 Iraq War, but the US got it right far...

Published:Wednesday | January 4, 2023 | 8:55 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: The American baseball player Lawrence 'Yogi' Berra is widely quoted as observing, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Whether or not he actually said it, the point is valid....

Published:Wednesday | November 16, 2022 | 10:23 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK : Midterm elections take place in the United States every four years, halfway into a president’s term and two years before the next presidential election. At stake is one-third of the Senate, the entire House of Representatives, some...

Published:Wednesday | August 17, 2022 | 10:21 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: Much of the foreign-policy conversation in the United States over the past two weeks has centred on whether US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ought to have visited Taiwan. Her backers point out that there was precedent for such a visit...

Published:Wednesday | July 27, 2022 | 8:53 AMRichard Haass for Project Syndicate

NEW YORK: It is often said that no one wins a war, just that some lose less than others. Russia’s war against Ukraine promises to be no exception. One clear loser is already evident: the planet. The war has become the international priority...

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