The War in Gaza and the International Context with Aaron David Miller and Stephen Walt

Stephen Walt and Aaron David Miller, two of the most thoughtful analysts of US policy in the Middle East today, sat down with Professor Galen Jackson on April 25, 2024 to discuss Washington’s interests, objectives, and diplomatic record in the region, as well as how the United States might approach the area in the midst of the war in Gaza. They discussed a variety of topics, including what motivates American policy in the Middle East, what Washington’s options are in the region, and whether the United States still has an important role to play in the Arab-Israeli peacemaking process. This was the final of three roundtable discussions on the background to the war in Gaza and the international context. This public conversation was moderated by Associate Professor Galen Jackson of the Political Science Department.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.
His book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007, co-authored with John J. Mearsheimer) was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages. His most recent book is The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (2018).
Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy. He has written five books, including his most recent, The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President (Palgrave, 2014) and The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam, 2008). He received his PhD in Middle East and U.S. diplomatic history from the University of Michigan in 1977. Between 1978 and 2003, Miller served at the State Department as an historian, analyst, negotiator, and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the senior advisor for Arab-Israeli negotiations. He also served as the deputy special Middle East coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations, senior member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and in the office of the historian. Miller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Galen Jackson ’09 received his Ph.D. in from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. Jackson teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, the international relations of the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has published articles on the Arab-Israeli dispute in a number of scholarly journals, including International Security, Security Studies, the Journal of Cold War Studies, Middle East Journal, and Diplomacy & Statecraft. He is the author of A Lost Peace Great Power Politics and the Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967-1979 (Cornell University Press, 2023) and editor of The 1973 Arab-Israeli War ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2023).
These events were sponsored be the Class of ’71 Public Affairs Forum, the Cohan Family Forum Fund, the Lecture Committee and the Class of ’46 Memorial Lecture Fund.