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IN PRINT

This series features James F. Hoge, editor and Peter G. Peterson Chair of Foreign Affairs, chairman of the International Center for Journalists, and CGA Advisory Board Member, in conversation with leading journalists and authors. Books will be available for sale.

Peter Galbraith
Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies

Thursday, February 26, 2009
6:30 – 7:45 p.m.

Peter W. Galbraith served as the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia. He is currently the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Galbraith surveys the occupation in Iraq, now in its fifth year, with strong words for optimists who regard the surge as a road to victory. The author argues that the war has achieved the opposite of many of its stated objectives: Israel is not safer and Middle Eastern regimes seem still to be moving in an antidemocratic direction. He discusses a possible Iraqi three-state solution, whereby the country would be divided by ethnic group—an extreme measure that he believes might stabilize the region.

Andrew Bacevich
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He is the author of The New American Militarism, and his writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the recipient of a Lannan Award and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Limits of Power identifies a triple crisis facing America: the economy, in remarkable disarray, can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad; the government, transformed by an imperial presidency, is a democracy in form only; U.S. involvement in endless wars, driven by a deep infatuation with military power, has been a catastrophe for the body politic. If the nation is to solve its predicament, Bacevich argues, it will need the revival of the neglected tradition of realism.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
God Is Back: How The Global Rise of Faith Will Change The World

Tuesday, April 14, 2009
6:30 PM – 7:45 PM

Both John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge were educated at Oxford and work for the Economist. Micklethwait has overseen the magazine’s Los Angeles and New York bureaus and is now its U.S. editor. Wooldridge has served as West Coast correspondent, social policy correspondent, and management editor, and is currently the Washington, D.C. correspondent. Together, they have coauthored four books. Religion is surging worldwide, and nations that once swore off faith—or even tried to stamp it out—are now run by avowedly religious leaders. Formerly secular conflicts have taken on a religious cast. Since the Enlightenment, intellectuals have assumed that modernization would kill religion—and that religious America is an oddity. The authors argue that religion and modernity can thrive together. God Is Back shows how the same American ideas that created our unique religious style can be applied to channel the rising tide of faith away from volatility and violence.