AFP
Reporters who covered Secretary of State George P. Shultz liked to refer to him as “Buddha” because of his calm demeanor in the face of world crises.
Shultz, who died on Feb. 6 at the age of 100, was perhaps best known for working with President Ronald Reagan to help end the Cold War.
It’s not easy to sum up the career of a statesman who served for six and a half years as Secretary of State during a time of turmoil overseas. His was the longest tenure since that served by Dean Rusk.
Rusk served for eight years, from early 1961 until January 20, 1969.
Washington is back, and so are London and Brussels
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Identity matters. It matters most amid flux, which the 21st Century is riddled with. Compromising the past and adding new components always knock on identity doors. Distinguishing the non-negotiable identity components from the negotiable gives us a head start. Our non-negotiable component remains Sonar Bangla, and all that that entails. We directly draw that term s romantic tones and drawn-out hues from Rabindranath Tagore, indirectly from others in our cultural pantheon. Their political manifestation was Bangladesh s 1971 birth. Ever since, negotiable components stole the limelight, exposing how mobile empathy is part of our tapestry.
No country can escape identity mobility. The Statue of Liberty, whose huddled masses tag (which invited the tired, poor, and those breathing to be free from the late 19th Century to a land of opportunity ), can barely be whispered today: still a louder Make America great again voice of a less welcoming country has not tarnished its land
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All great powers have a deeply ingrained self-perception shaped by historical experience, geography, culture, beliefs, and myths. Many Chinese today yearn to recover the greatness of a time when they ruled unchallenged at the pinnacle of their civilization, before “the century of humiliation.” Russians are nostalgic for Soviet days, when they were the other superpower and ruled from Poland to Vladivostok. Henry Kissinger once observed that Iranian leaders had to choose whether they wanted to be “a nation or a cause,” but great powers and aspiring great powers often see themselves as both. Their self-perception shapes their definition of the national interest, of what constitutes genuine security and the actions and resources necessary to achieve it. Often, it is these self-perceptions that drive nations, empires, and city-states forward. And sometimes to their ruin. Much of the drama of the past century resulted from great powers whose aspi