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.  

A few days ago, a senior international official consulted me about the mediation system and where a diplomatic peace conference for the Middle East might be convened, in the nature of a new Westphalia for the region, that is, a settlement capable of re-establishing sovereignty and mutual recognition in this deteriorating international climate.

Founding narratives can be read as more than historical commemorations. They are frameworks through which societies organize meaning, discipline public memory, and define what counts as legitimacy. In At-Turaif Dialogues (V), Saudi Founding Day (1727) is used as a vantage point to distinguish between an early “intellectual nerve” of collective order and the later consolidation of modern administrative form (1932).

I searched for a tone that would not flatter a weary age, and the sky itself offered a ready language for reflection: a ring of fire in an annular eclipse; another calendar, in the Chinese East, opening onto the “Year of the Fire Horse,” the emblem of rapid change; and in the West, Ash Wednesday announcing the beginning of Lent. Fire in the sky, ash on the forehead, fasting on the earth.  

Canada lowered its flags for a leader the global press never quite learned how to describe, but whose absence the country felt immediately.  The death of Kirsty Duncan on January 26, 2026, after a prolonged battle with cancer, was not a dramatic political moment.  It came instead as a quiet inflection point—six days after Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, stood in Davos and declared that the world had entered a phase of “rupture, not transition.”…