On my way to the airport, leaving Boston at the end of this summer, I passed the Kennedy School and remembered a photograph Cecil Stoughton took in the summer of 1963. President John F. Kennedy is aboard the presidential yacht, Honey Fitz, off Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, savoring an ice cream cone as though history had granted him a few minutes outside it.

Along the Nā Pali Coast of Kauaʻi, the cloud-wrapped mountains look as though the Pacific itself had split them open to reveal their history: layers of lava risen from the ocean floor, then carved by water until the volcano turned green and almost concealed its origins. However far apart the Hawaiian islands may appear above the water, beneath it they belong to a single geological movement.

In the course of a medical trip to Basel, I visited the hall where the First Zionist Congress convened in 1897. It was there that Theodor Herzl posed the question: Can a people without a state become a state? History has already answered that question.

In the brief lull created by the FIFA World Cup, I arrived in Washington, D.C., as though the world itself had paused to catch its breath. The previous tournament had been held in Qatar; this one unfolds across the United States, just as America marks the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. Yet politics knows no final whistle.

There are jurists who establish law, and there are fathers of jurisprudence. Fathers who do not merely guard the text, but shelter the school, its questions, its institutions, its teachers and its students. The jurist preserves the rule once it has settled; the father tends to the inquiry while it is still nameless, without an institutional home or a tradition to protect it.

I travelled from Diriyah to the new Red Sea city, Red Sea Global, and stood on a shore of the Arabian Peninsula unlike the Gulf in its anxiety, and unlike Hormuz in its tension. The water seemed to suggest a wider identity: maritime, commercial, human; not founded on fear of the other, but on mutual passage.

I begin with a sincere and well-deserved vote of thanks to the security personnel and all those who served the Guests of God. The success of this year’s Hajj was a living image of state efficacy: a state able to serve its own people and the peoples of the world. Thank you for your service.

On the road to Lake Biwa, in a conversation with a former Japanese general about middle powers and the summit between the American and Chinese poles, he said to me: “Nations do not live by power alone, but by endurance.” He was describing Japan’s policy of strategic endurance, or senryakuteki nintai (戦略的忍耐), when a state’s nerves and supply chains are tested.

On a Friday evening in April 2026, we gathered in the Henry Cavendish Room at Peterhouse, my college and the oldest college in Cambridge, by candlelight, as old Cambridge custom would have it. A few steps from the River Cam, at King’s College, John Maynard Keynes had completed The General Theory almost a century earlier.

In Florence, the vision began to clarify.  Not as discovery, but as confirmation.  This graceful city, founded as a Roman colony and later becoming one of the defining symbols of the Renaissance, does not persuade you that civilization is built by erasing what came before.

I had not been to the United States for six months.  That is not long in the life of a country, but it is long enough to notice a change in its weather.  What I felt this time was not merely the usual political noise, but something more exacting: a country growing grander in its self-display, and more estranged from itself.

The world is no longer facing a single crisis that can be contained; it is living through cascading crises.  From the fires of tension in the Strait to the tragedy of Gaza, from the attrition of Ukraine to a global economy that trembles whenever deterrence falters, the pattern is clear.  

The familiar distinction between hard and soft power, which seemed a useful way to simplify the multidimensional dynamics of interstate influence in the century gone by, seems hopelessly insufficient to describe what is happening in the one we are in now.

Over the past summer we have seen how a 1°C rise in average global temperature affects the incidence rate of natural disasters. The images of wildfires burning through Amazonia, Siberia, California, Australia, Turkey and Greece are still vivid in the memory, as are the floods that swept down the lower Rhine and across Henan Province in China, and the heatwaves that broke temperature records from Russia to Spain and made some countries all but uninhabitable for those without air-conditioning.

The familiar distinction between hard and soft power, which seemed a useful way to simplify the multidimensional dynamics of interstate influence in the century gone by, seems hopelessly insufficient to describe what is happening in the one we are in now.

Considering the historical example of the Marshall Plan, this Middle East North Africa Forum at Cambride project onsiders the possible contours of a multilateral effort by the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council to reconstruct and stabilize the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, with particular support to Yemen, Syria and Iraq in a way that is both economically sustainable and conducive to the region’s long-term stability.

The Jerusalem First Project was initiated to liberate the agenda of the Middle East peace negotiations. This one year project aimed at offering a new direction for peace mediation in the Middle East in the backdrop of the controversial Trump policies

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Central Asia and Southeast Asia in September and October of 2013, he raised the initiative of jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (hereinafter referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative), which have attracted close attention from all over the world.

The US, the EU and China: which has the most effective policies?

A climate armistice? Actor Alan Cumming delivers a call to action

Panellists debate whether the UNFCCC system is fake diplomacy

Harvard students on political sclerosis, racism and climate justice

Four teams of Scotia fellows present their policy proposals

How domestic courts can be used to fight climate change

Are the UK’s climate change laws really a model others can follow?

The role of courts, universities and the street in fighting carbon

How cities can work together to outflank government inaction

How to deal with the scale and complexity of climate change

Who we are, why we are, what we’re trying to achieve – and how

Dean Adil Najam’s lecture on how we can learn to live with global warming