A nation must think before it acts.
Harvey Sicherman is President and Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has extensive experience in writing, research, and analysis of U.S. foreign and national security policy, both in government and out. He served as Special Assistant to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. (1981-82) and was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of Secretary of State James A. Baker, III (1991-1992). He was also a consultant to Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr. (1982-1987) and to Secretary of State George Shultz (1988). A graduate of the University of Scranton, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania (Political Science) where he received a Salvatori Fellowship. Dr. Sicherman is author or editor of numerous books, chapters, and articles, including America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How To Fix Them, co-edited with John Lehman (2002), Is There Still A West? The Future of the Atlantic Alliance, co-edited with William Anthony Hay (2007) and The War on Terror: Collected Essays, 2001-2006, co-edited with Stephen Gale and Michael Radu (2007). He is editor of Templeton Lectures on Religion and World Affairs, 1996-2007 (FPRI, 2008). He is currently at work on Cheap Hawks, Cheap Doves, and the Pursuit of American Strategy. His books also include Palestinian Autonomy, Self-Government and Peace (Westview Press, 1993), and The Three Percent Solution and the Future of NATO (1982).
This essay is based on a lecture for a two-day History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Wachman Center in cooperation with the American Institute for History Education on U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modern Middle East.