Westminster Institute talks

https://westminster-institute.org/events/total-competition-the-china-challenge-in-the-south-china-sea/ Patrick M. Cronin is the Asia-Pacific Security Chair  at Hudson Institute. Dr. Cronin’s research program analyzes the  challenges and opportunities confronting the United States in the  Indo-Pacific region, including China’s total competition campaign, the  future of the Korean peninsula, and strengthening U.S. alliances and  partnerships. Dr. Cronin was previously senior advisor and senior  director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New  American Security (CNAS), and before that, senior director of the  Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National Defense  University, where he simultaneously oversaw the Center for the Study of  Chinese Military Affairs. Dr. Cronin has a rich and diverse background in both Asian-Pacific  security and U.S. defense, and foreign and development policy. Prior to  leading INSS, Dr. Cronin served as the director of studies at the  London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).  At IISS, he also served as editor of the Adelphi Papers and as the  executive director of the Armed Conflict Database. Before joining IISS,  Dr. Cronin was senior vice president and director of research at the  Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In 2001, Dr. Cronin was confirmed by the United States Senate to the  third-ranking position at the U.S. Agency for International Development  (USAID). While serving as Assistant Administrator for Policy and Program  Coordination, Dr. Cronin also led the interagency task force that  helped design the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). From 1998 until 2001, Dr. Cronin served as director of research at  the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to that, he spent seven years at the  National Defense University, first arriving at INSS in 1990 as a senior  research professor covering Asian and long-range security issues. He was  the founding executive editor of Joint Force Quarterly, and  subsequently became both deputy director and director of research at the  Institute. He received the Army’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award  upon his departure from NDU in 1997. He has also been a senior analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a  U.S. Naval Reserve intelligence officer, and an analyst with the  Congressional Research Service and SRI International. He was associate  editor of Strategic Review and worked as an undergraduate at the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale News. Dr. Cronin has taught at Georgetown University’s Security Studies  Program, Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced  International Studies (SAIS), and the University of Virginia’s Woodrow  Wilson Department of Government. He read international relations at St. Antony’s College, University  of Oxford, where he received both his M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees, and  graduated with high honors from the University of Florida. He regularly  publishes essays in leading publications and frequently conducts  television and radio interviews.

https://westminster-institute.org/events/saudi-arabias-unpredictable-future/ Dr. Ali Alyami is the founder and Executive Director  of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, based in  Washington, D. C. He is a native of Saudi Arabia and has been an avid  advocate for political reforms in Saudi Arabia. The Center for Democracy & Human Rights in Saudi Arabia (CDHR)  focuses on Saudi domestic and foreign policies and their impact on, and  implications for, the Saudi people and the international community,  especially U.S. economic and national security interests. Due to its  centrality to Islam and possession of large quantities of fossil fuel  energy sources, Saudi Arabia plays a major religious and economic role  in the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims worldwide. CDHR was established  in 2004 to promote institutionalized democratic and human rights reforms  as the best way of achieving long term stability in Saudi Arabia. Previously, Dr. Alyami was a Senior Fellow at the Saudi Institute in  Washington, D.C., Director of an educational peace program for the  American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco, and a  Representative for the Arab Organization for Human Rights (a Cairo-based  group) in North America. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from the  Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, and a Master’s  Degree from California State University in Los Angeles. His Ph.D.  doctoral thesis was: “The Impact of Modernization on the Stability of  the Saudi Monarchy.” Dr. Alyami provided expert testimony regarding human rights in Saudi  Arabia before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. He also organized  and participated in many conferences and discussions about Saudi Arabia,  its policies and their impact on the Saudi people, the Middle East, and  the international community. Alyami has spoken at conferences in the  United States, London, Egypt, Sudan, and Israel, and is a frequent media  presence.

https://westminster-institute.org/events/iraqi-freedom-confronts-iranian-domination/ Dr. Bilal Wahab is the Nathan and Esther K. Wagner fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he focuses on governance in the Iraqi Kurdish region and in Iraq as a whole. He has taught at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, where he established the Center for Development and Natural Resources, a research program on oil and development. Dr. Wahab earned his Ph.D. from George Mason University. He received his M.A. from American University, where he was among the first Iraqis awarded a Fulbright scholarship. His master’s thesis was on How Iraqi Oil Smuggling Greases Violence. He earned his B.A. from Salahaddin University in Erbil. He has also taught at Salahaddin University in the Political Science and English Language Departments. Along with numerous scholarly articles, he has written extensively in the Arabic and Kurdish media. Dr. Wahab has contributed recent analyses on the subjects of: Kurdish Reactions to Their Abandonment in Syria; As Protests Explode, Iraq Must Get Serious About Reform; and Iraqi Kurdistan’s New Government. He speaks Arabic, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish.

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The United States’ approach to China since the Communist regime in  Beijing began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on  a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a  peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later the hope of producing a  benign People’s Republic of China has evaporated. The Communist Party of  China deceived the West into believing that its system and the  Party-ruled People’s Liberation Army were peaceful and posed no threat.  In fact, these misguided policies produced the emergence of a 21st century challenge that may be as dangerous to the United States and its  allies as the Soviet Union was. How can it meet this challenge? About the speaker Bill Gertz is an award-winning national security journalist and author of seven books, including Breakdown: How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11 and The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America. He last spoke at the Westminster Institute on his 2017 book,  iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age. He is currently senior editor of The Washington Free Beacon, an online news outlet, and national security columnist for The Washington Times. Gertz has an international reputation. Vyachaslav Trubnikov, head of  the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, once called him a “tool of the  CIA” after he wrote an article exposing Russian intelligence operations  in the Balkans. A senior CIA official once threatened to have a cruise  missile fired at his desk at The Washington Times after he wrote a  column critical of the CIA’s analysis of China. China’s communist  government also has criticized him for his news reports exposing China’s  weapons and missile sales to rogues states.

Transcript: https://westminster-institute.org/events/indonesias-muslim-counter-radicalization-movements/ Paul Marshall is Wilson Distinguished Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor University and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Leimena Institute,  Jakarta, Indonesia, and Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of  Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta. Mr. Marshall is the author and editor of more than twenty books on  religion and politics, especially religious freedom, including Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (2013, with Lela Gilbert and Nina Shea), Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (2011, with Nina Shea), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion (2009), Religious Freedom in the World (2007), Radical Islam’s Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (2005), The Rise of Hindu Extremism (2003), Islam at the Crossroads (2002), God and the Constitution (2002), The Talibanization of Nigeria (2002), Massacre at the Millennium (2001), Religious Freedom in the World (2000), Egypt’s Endangered Christians (1999), Just Politics (1998), Heaven Is Not My Home (1998), A Kind of Life Imposed on Man (1996), and the best-selling, award-winning survey of religious persecution worldwide Their Blood Cries Out (1997). He is the author of several hundred articles, and his writings have  been translated into Russian, German, French, Dutch, Spanish,  Portuguese, Norwegian, Danish, Albanian, Japanese, Malay, Korean,  Arabic, Farsi, and Chinese. He is in frequent demand for lectures and  media appearances, including interviews on ABC Evening News; CNN; PBS;  Fox; the British, Australian, Canadian, South African, and Japanese  Broadcasting Corporations; and Al Jazeera. His work has been published  in, or is the subject of, articles in the New York Times, Wall St.  Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Boston  Globe, Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, First Things, New  Republic, Weekly Standard, Reader’s Digest, and many other newspapers  and magazines. Mr. Marshall is also a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute  for the Study of Religion at Baylor University. He was also a part of  the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center’s  Religious Freedom Project.

Transcript: https://westminster-institute.org/events/the-ongoing-war-in-the-persian-gulf-why-does-it-matter-to-the-us/ David Des Roches is Associate Professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Security Studies at  National Defense University. Prior to this, he was the Defense  Department director responsible for policy concerning Saudi Arabia,  Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Prior  to this assignment, he has served in the Office of the Secretary of  Defense as Liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, as senior  country director for Pakistan, as NATO operations director, and as  deputy director for peacekeeping. An Airborne Ranger in the Army Reserve, he was awarded the Bronze  Star for service in Afghanistan.  He has commanded conventional and  special operations parachute units and has served on the US Special  Operations Command staff as well as on the Joint Staff. He graduated  from the United States Military Academy and obtained advanced degrees in  Arab Politics from the University of London School of Oriental and  African Studies, in War Studies from Kings College London, and Strategic  Studies from the US Army War College. He has also attended the Federal  Executive Institute, the German Staff College’s Higher Officer Seminar,  the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and the U.S. Army  Command and General Staff College.His academic awards include Phi Kappa  Phi, the British Marshall Scholarship, designation as a Distinguished  Alumnus of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, and  selection as a Joseph Malone Fellow of the National Council of Arab  American Relations. His most recent publication is “Dominance versus Disruption: Asymmetry in Gulf Security,” which analyzes the security objectives of the Gulf Arab states and Iran. He previously spoke at Westminster on the Push and Pull of Religious Extremism: Who Are the Terrorists, How Are they Recruited, What Can We Do?

https://westminster-institute.org/events/liberty-in-the-things-of-god-the-christian-origins-of-religious-freedom/ Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the  History of Christianity emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is an  elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past  president of the American Academy of Religion, the North American  Patristics Society, and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He is chairman  of the board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the  publisher of First Things. His new book is Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of  Religious Freedom. (It will be available at his lecture for purchase and  signing.) Dr. Wilken states: “Religious freedom rests on a simple  truth: religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart  and for that reason cannot be coerced by external force.” Chronicling  the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early  Christian movement through the seventeenth century, he shows that the  origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious,  not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and  women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without  liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on  writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth  centuries, reminds us of how “the meditations of the past were fitted to  affairs of a later day.”; For instance, Dr. Wilken quotes Tertullian  (ca. 155-240): “the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another.  It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by  choice not coercion that we should be led to religion.” Carlos Eire, author of Reformations, says, “Wilken argues convincingly  that the concept of religious freedom originated with Christian  thinkers, challenging one of the most revered paradigms in Western  intellectual history. In the process, he also injects a corrective twist  into current debates about secularist hegemony.” Dr. Wilken received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has  taught at Fordham University, the University of Notre Dame, the  Institutum Patristicum (Augustinianum) in Rome, the Gregorian University  in Rome, Providence College, and Lutheran Theological Seminary. He is the author of more than 10 books, including The First Thousand  Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale, 2013), The Spirit of  Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale, 2003),  Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 1995), and The Christians as  the Romans Saw Them (Yale, 1984).

Transcript: https://westminster-institute.org/events/the-art-of-peace-engaging-a-complex-world/ Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, and teaches at American University. For several decades, she has been one of the finest analysts and best proponents of public diplomacy in the war of ideas. Her new book is The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World (Routledge). Her others books relevant to this topic are Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace and Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (Ret.) says, “Juliana Geran Pilon explains disconnects between the instrumental use of violence and objectives in recent and ongoing conflicts. The neglect of the political and human nature of war has been a common cause of strategic failure as well as a common flaw in theories that oftentimes contribute to those failures. Indeed, recent wartime plans have exhibited a narcissistic approach, failing to account for interactions with determined enemies and other complicating political, cultural, historical and economic factors. Armed conflict is a competition and, as Dr. Pilon points out, winning the peace requires fighting across all contested spaces and considering the consolidation of military gains as an integral part of war. It is not enough to read The Art of Peace. We must also heed its lessons.” Gen. James Mattis (Ret.) states that, “Juliana Pilon is to be commended for pressing the question of American competence in carrying out its global engagement. As she rightly points out in her book, we need to fully engage both our fundamental powers in American foreign policy: the power of inspiration and, when and where needed, the power of intimidation.”

Transcript: https://westminster-institute.org/events/the-fertile-crescent-after-isis-between-russia-iran-and-israel/ Dr. Shmuel Bar served for thirty years in the Israeli government, first in the IDF Intelligence and then in the analytic and operational positions in the Israeli Office of the Prime Minister. Since the mid 1980s, he has specialized in the ideology and operational codes of Islamic fundamentalist movements and particularly the Jihadi movement that later evolved into al-Qaeda. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam and the Duty to Jihad. He holds a Ph.D. in History of the Middle East from Tel-Aviv University. From 2003 and June 2013, Dr. Bar served as Senior Research Fellow and then Director of Studies at the Institute of Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel and on the steering team of the annual “Herzliya Conference”. In addition to being an Adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, he is also a Senior Research Fellow at International Institute for Non-Proliferation Studies, has been (2007) Distinguished Koret Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has lectured at various academic institutions on issues relating to Israeli national security. Dr. Bar has headed over 25 research projects – many of them for US government agencies – and published over 40 books, monographs and articles in professional journals on issues relating to the Middle East, including strategic issues in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, deterrence (both nuclear and vis-à-vis terrorist threats), radical Islamic ideology, Iran, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians.He heads “Shmuel Bar- Research and Consultancy Ltd.” and is also Senior Research Fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research at the Technion University in Haifa. Dr. Bar is also founder and CEO of IntuView Ltd – an Israeli based software company in the area of natural language processing.