Diplomacy and International Politics

On the occasion of Remembrance Day, Nicholas Burns delivers a speech at Saint Clement’s Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania about The Great War when, between July 1914 and November 1918, over eighteen million men, women and children perished.

Jens Stoltenberg,NATO Secretary General, discussed the future of the NATO alliance during this speech, given at the Harvard Kennedy School on September 23, 2016. He described the alliance as a responsive organization, capable of adapting to changes in the international security landscape but committed to the continuity of its founding values. In particular, he emphasized the necessity of maintaining a policy of absolute solidarity among member states, especially  in light of the exacerbating civil war in Syria and Russia’s aggressive stance toward countries to the East of NATO member state borders.

"It wasn’t that our motives were cynical or misplaced or that we wished misfortune for each other.  We were never adversaries.  In fact, time and again, from Harry Truman to JFK to Ronald Reagan, American Presidents called for a positive breakthrough in our relations with India.  But, more often than not, and for different reasons, we never found the trust that governments need to develop a true partnership. Happily, that all changed when, on the American side, President Clinton and then President Bush made the ambitious and prescient strategic bet that India would rise in our time as one of the world’s great powers and that therefore we had, as a matter of basic self-interest, to forge a much closer relationship with it."