A nation must think before it acts.
Message from the President · September 2013
Dear Friends,
This September, we are especially pleased to launch a new initiative – the Main Line Breakfast Briefings, a monthly series chaired by FPRI Trustee Jim Gately. Featuring talks by FPRI scholars on a wide range of foreign policy and national security issues, the Main Line Breakfasts will be held at the Philadelphia Country Club in Gladwyne, PA, from 7:30 to 9:00 a.m. at 1601 Spring Mill Road.
This complements two initiatives inaugurated in January of this year — Geopolitics with Granieri, the monthly interactive program in our office and on the web, and the Princeton Committee of FPRI, a monthly lecture series directed by FPRI Trustee John Haines and held at the Present Day Club in Princeton, NJ.
These in turn supplement our existing programs in Manhattan, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. In Manhattan, we have the Manhattan Salons at the homes of NYC Friends of FPRI and chaired by FPRI Trustee Devon Cross and FPRI Senior Fellow Vanessa Neumann, plus the lecture series on military history hosted and cosponsored by the NY Historical Society. In Washington, DC, we have a series of symposia and conferences (all webcast) cosponsored and hosted by the Reserve Officers Association and chaired by FPRI Trustees Hon. Dov Zakheim and Hon. John Hillen. In Philadelphia, we feature the year-long Stanley and Arlene Ginsburg Lectures and the Annual Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs, both hosted by the National Liberty Museum. You can visit the complete collection of seventeen annual Templeton Lectures to date on our website.
We briefly describe each of our September programs below, with a hyperlink for more details. Note that reservations are required in advance (RSVP: events@fpri.org). Just remember that we always add impromptu programs to provide in-depth analysis of news-breaking developments.
To avail yourself of the full range of programming, the best thing to do is become a member or partner of FPRI at the level that gives you the benefits you seek while helping to sustain a program that is the moral equivalent of graduate school without the jargon. For more information about the many benefits of memberships and partnerships at FPRI, please click here.
Wednesday, September 11: Main Line Breakfast Briefings. In the inaugural session of the Main Line series, Lawrence Husick, co-Chair of FPRI’s Center for the Study of Terrorism, will provide an easy-to-understand guide to “China, Iran, and the Application of Cyber Weapons,” which has been described by former National Security Advisor Robert MacFarlane as “the best briefing I’ve heard from anyone, anywhere” on this subject. (7:30 – 9:00 a.m.)
Tuesday, September 17 at FPRI and on the Web: Geopolitics with Granieri – Exclusively for FPRI Members. Join FPRI’s Ron Granieri, as he “interrogates” Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, on the turmoil in the Middle East. This event is webcast live but you need to register online for the webcast. (11:30 -12:30 program. FPRI Patrons ($500) are invited to lunch following.)
Wednesday, September 18: Manhattan Salon at the homes of NYC Friends of FPRI. Michael Doran, the Roger Hertog Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of FPRI’s Board of Advisors, will discuss the latest events in the Middle East. This is by invitation only and no details are provided on the web. (6:00 to 8:00 p.m.)
Tuesday, September 24 at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia: This booktalk on Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God is part of the Stanley and Arlene Ginsburg Lecture Series. Matthew Levitt, Senior Fellow and Director of the Washington Institute’s Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, will discuss his new book, providing the first thorough examination of Hezbollah’s covert operations beyond Lebanon’s borders, covering the rest of the Middle East, Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and North America. (5:30 registration, 5:45 lecture. Partners invited to dinner following.)
Saturday, September 28, at the Loews Hotel in Philadelphia: This evening event is the public portion of a weekend-long conference for high school teachers on The Creation of Liberal Democracy: Did it Happen in Philadelphia by Accident?, exploring the cultural, political, and economic prerequisites for liberal democracy – a subject germane to today’s historic events elsewhere in the world. The evening event features Professor Alan Charles Kors on “Why the Pursuit of Happiness?” (7:15 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.)
Monday, September 30: Study Group on America and the West – Open to university faculty, graduate students, and FPRI Members at the Fellows Level ($1000), this session of the West Study Group features Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, National Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, speaking on her new book American Umpire (Harvard University Press, 2013). She offers a narrative of American foreign policy that depicts America as an umpire rather than an empire.
Also on Monday, September 30: a cosponsored event at the University of Pennsylvania, with Penn’s Center for East Asian Studies, featuring Frank Dikotter on his new book The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-57. (12:00 to 1:30 p.m. in the Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd Floor, UPenn’s Van Pelt Library, 3420 Walnut Street, Phila. Free and Open to the public but reservations required.)
If you have any questions regarding these events, please don’t hesitate to contact Eli Gilman directly at (215) 732-3774 x 255, or by email at events@fpri.org. To keep up with FPRI, be sure to “like” us on Facebook – and join our nearly 20,000 fans from all over the world.
If you wish to support FPRI, you can do so here. If, however, you wish to be removed from this list, just reply to this email and type “remove” in the subject line.
P.S. We re-start our Princeton Series on October 10 with Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer speaking on “Israel and Palestine: Does the Two-State Solution Have a Future?”
Hope to see you at one or more of our events!
Alan H. Luxenberg
President
Foreign Policy Research Institute