CONFERENCES & EVENTS

Great Power Competition and the Middle East

June 15, 2023
7:30 p.m.–9:00 p.m. ET
WEBINAR

F. Gregory Gause, III, Andrew Scobell, Kathryn Stoner, Shibley Telhami, and Gideon Rose discussed great power competition and the Middle East. A new collaboration between China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia has emerged. What does such a collaboration mean for U.S. foreign policy? This event was organized by the Network for Responsible Public Policy.

Video

SPEAKERS

F. GREGORY GAUSE, III joined the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M in 2014 as the head of the Department of International Affairs, serving until 2022 in that capacity, and holds the John H. Lindsey ’44 Chair. Dr. Gause received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University (1987) and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo (1982-83) and at Middlebury College (1984). Dr. Gause’s research focuses on the international politics of the Middle East, with a particular interest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. He has published three books, the most recent of which is The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Security Studies, Middle East Journal, and The National Interest, as well as in other journals and edited volumes. He has testified on Persian Gulf issues before the Committee on International Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

ANDREW SCOBELL is the Distinguished Fellow for China at the United States Institute of Peace and Adjunct Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Prior to joining USIP, he spent eleven years as Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. During 2021 he held the Donald Bren Chair in Non-Western Strategic Thought in the Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University. Earlier he served on the faculty of Texas A&M University (2007-2010) and at the U.S. Army War College (1999-2007). Scobell’s publications include: Crossroads of Competition: China, Russia and the United States in the Middle East (RAND 2022); China-Russia Cooperation: Determining Factors, Future Trajectories, Implications for the United States (RAND 2021); China in the Middle East: The Wary Dragon (RAND 2016). Scobell earned a doctorate in Political Science from Columbia University. He was born and raised in Hong Kong.

KATHRYN STONER is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI’s Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books, including Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2021).

SHIBLEY TELHAMI is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, and the Director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll. He is also Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Before coming to the University of Maryland, he taught at several universities, including Cornell University, the Ohio State University, the University of Southern California, Princeton University, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in political science. He has also been active in the foreign policy arena. He has advised every U.S. administration from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including his best-selling The Stakes: America and the Middle East, which was selected by Foreign Affairs as one of the top five books on the Middle East in 2003, and the forthcoming Peace Derailed: Obama, Trump, Biden, and the Decline of Diplomacy on Israel/Palestine, 2011-2022 (co-authored).

MODERATOR

GIDEON ROSE is the Mary and David Boies Distinguished Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was previously Editor of Foreign Affairs from 2010 to 2021. He served as Associate Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995 under the Clinton Administration.  His most recent articles in foreign relations are “Why the War in Ukraine Won’t Go Nuclear”, and “The Irony of Ukraine.”

EVENT CO-SPONSORS

Network for Responsible Public Policy
The Academy of Political Science
The Puffin Foundation