The Yom Kippur War: A Case Study in Strategy, Power, & Character
Explore the Yom Kippur War, one of the great understudied hinge points of history.
Winter 2016
Washington, DC
Our goal with the “Great Figures of the 20th Century” Weekend Seminars series will be to examine the worldviews and leadership styles of four key individuals – Churchill, Reagan, Thatcher, and Ben-Gurion – in order to surface underlying questions about statesmanship. We will ask questions such as: What is statesmanship? How does one recognize it? And if one can, in fact, speak of statesmanship, what are (or should be) its fundamental constituent components?
These seminars are not intended to be mere biographical surveys of great lives well lived. Our goal, ideally, will be to spend some time covering the basic narratives of what transpired during each figure’s career, but then to engage in extended, thoughtful seminar-style discussion of the issues that these events and narratives raise, exploring their unfolding in our past and reflecting on their implications for our future. We will hope not to simply learn about our figures, but from them.
Photos courtesy Fritz Cohen, Government Photographic Office, Israel | Kluger Zoltan, Government Photographic Office, Israel
Mike Doran on America in the Middle East
Michael Doran, an expert in U.S. policy toward the Middle East, radical Islam, and the Arab- Israeli conflict, is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He has also held a number of senior U.S. government posts related to Middle East policy and strategic communication.
Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He specializes in Middle East security issues.
In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council, where he was responsible for helping to devise and coordinate United States strategies on a variety of Middle East issues, including Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. efforts to contain Iran and Syria. He also served in the Bush administration as a senior advisor in the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon.
Before coming to Hudson, Doran was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has also held teaching positions at NYU, Princeton, and the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Pan-Arabism before Nasser, which analyzes the first Arab-Israeli war as an inter-Arab conflict, and Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, about President Eisenhower and the Middle East. He appears frequently on television, and has published extensively in Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, Commentary, Mosaic Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Born in Kokomo, Indiana, Doran went to elementary school in Carmel, outside of Indianapolis, before his family moved to Fullerton, California, where he graduated from Sunny Hills High School. He received a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton.
Readings:
Vance Serchuk
Vance Serchuk is Executive Director of the KKR Global Institute and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Prior to joining KKR, Mr. Serchuk served for six years as the senior national security advisor to Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut).
Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts is presently a Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College, London and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Masters and Commanders, which won the Emery Reves Award of the International Churchill Society and was shortlisted for The Duke of Westminster’s Gold Medal for Military History and The British Army Military Book Award. He is presently writing a biography of Sir Winston Churchill.
Daniel Johnson
Daniel Johnson is an author, journalist, and founding editor of Standpoint, a monthly British cultural and political magazine. He is the author of White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was Fought on the Chessboard.
Steven F. Hayward
Steven F. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Boalt Hall Law School. Hayward is the author of a two-volume narrative history of Ronald Reagan and his effect on American political life, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989.
Michael Doran
Michael Doran, an expert in U.S. policy toward the Middle East, radical Islam, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has also held a number of senior U.S. government posts related to Middle East policy and strategic communication.