The Institute of World Politics

About the Book: For centuries an aggressive secularism has fought to occupy the place once held by religion in Western society. Its intellectual leaders are ambitious. Their goal is to remove God from public discourse and then from memory. While they claimed that godlessness would bring about an era of peace, it brought history’s bloodiest century instead. Civic institutions founded on Judeo-Chris...

About the Lecture: This lecture will focus on the background of the build up to the 2014 - 2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and what the United States Government did to respond to this epidemic. Steven VanRoekel will discuss how the US tackled the challenges from the epidemic and what the government learned from it. About the Speaker: Steven VanRoekel is the Chief Operating Officer of the Rockef...

This is the Sixth Annual Brian Kelley Memorial Lecture at The Institute of World Politics. About Brian Kelley Memorial Lectures: The passing of Professor Brian Kelley was a grave loss to the Institute and to our country. His knowledge, experiences and dedication were at a level that is hard to match. In his time at IWP, he brought his own knowledge, as well as the knowledge of experts in the intel...

This event is sponsored by the Center for Intermarium Studies and the Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies at IWP. About the Lecture: The European Union is facing immense internal pressures as well as complex external dilemmas. The migration crisis, Brexit, and the rise of new political ideas have put the debate regarding the future of the EU integration in focus. The upcoming European Parliamentary...

About the Lecture: In 1927, Mr. David Smolansky’s Jewish grandparents fled Soviet Ukraine for Cuba, from which they fled to Venezuela in 1970 after Fidel Castro's socialism caused their family business to crumble. This family history contributed to Mr. Smolanksy’s desire to become involved in politics and to oppose Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Eventually, he earned the position of mayor of El H...

About the Book: Soon after the American Revolution, certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking tow...

About the Lecture: This discussion will examine the influential role played by Iran within Iraq and the challenge of building a functioning Iraqi state in the context of Iranian penetration of Iraqi politics, economics, security, and religion. In security, the rise of the Islamic State provided an opportunity for Iran to assist Iraq by standing up Shi'a militias, which are now being used to furthe...

About the lecture Dr. Marek Chodakiewicz will discuss how the criminal underworld was coopted by the Bolshevik revolution, how it was tamed and broken by the Soviet state, how it coexisted with it and infiltrated it; how it became transformed in the post-Soviet realm; and how it became second nature of Putin's system in Russia. Dr. Chodakiewicz will stress historical continuities of Russia's crimi...

About the Lecture: Xi Jinping, China's Communist Party Chairman and President, has ambitious plans to make China a global power. This lecture will discuss the plans to rebuild ancient trading routes with new infrastructure that can become military bases or ports. The lecture also will cover China's plans for a modern, powerful military that can project expeditionary forces to defend China's new, f...

About the Book: Sovereignty in the 21st Century and the Crisis for Identity, Cultures, Nation-States, and Civilizations describes a world already at war with itself. It is a world in which urban globalists fear and despise regional nationalists, and vice-versa. It is a time when the concept of the nation-state sovereignty incarnate has slipped from the minds of many. The populations of the mega-ci...

About the Lecture: This examination of American governance makes a rather unique comparison of economic democracy with political democracy. It will be shown that this is the mechanism that governs and regulates much of our lives, not government, and does so in a much more efficient, responsive manner than political democracy. In the process, it draws a variety of conclusions about the consequences...

About the Lecture: In 1985 and 1986, the CIA experienced the unparalleled loss of its stable of Soviet assets, which all but wiped out human source reporting on the Soviet Union. In this lecture, Ms. Grimes will discuss her and her co-spy catcher's personal involvement in the CIA's effort to identify the reason for those losses and to protect future Soviet assets from a similar fate of execution....

Maria Juczewska, IWP, Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies. This year, we are celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Poland's regaining independence. One of the factors that greatly contributed to the rebirth of Poland was the support of General Haller's Army, created on the American soil. The lecture discusses the Army's diplomatic and military contribution to Polish independence.

Matthew J. O’Brien, Federation for American Immigration Reform, Director of Research. The nations of Europe are rapidly becoming the victims of their unnecessarily generous immigration policies, their overly broad concepts of religious freedom and their unwillingness to defend Judeo-Christian culture from Islamic encroachment. Will Poland and its neighbors be the next casualties of this disturbing...

About the Lecture: On March 15, 2018, the DHS and FBI announced that the Russian government cyber actors had conducted, since at least March 2016, a multi-stage cyber intrusion campaign in various U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including the energy, nuclear, commercial, water, aviation, and manufacturing sectors. In her upcoming lecture, “Russian Cyber Doctrine and the Targeting of U.S. Cri...

About the Book: The history of espionage is far older than any of today’s intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the most successful World War II intelligence agency, were completely unaware that their predecessors in earlier moments of national crisis had broken the codes of Napoleon during the Napoleo...

About the Lecture: The collapse of Venezuela is no longer an internal or domestic problem; its migrant exodus has made it a hemispheric crisis. Most impacted is key US ally Colombia, where they are swelling the ranks of the ELN terrorist group. Maduro will reach the end of his presidential term in January 2019, but, with deepening repression and escalating brutality, shows no signs of leaving offi...

Dr. Frank Marlo is Dean of Academics at The Institute of World Politics. He formerly served as a Professor of Strategic Studies at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. He received his Ph. D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in May 2006. From January 2002 until January 2005, he served as Assistant for Counterproliferation Policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defens...

About the Book: In Invisible Slaves, W. Kurt Hauser discusses slavery around the world, with research and firsthand stories that reframe slavery as a modern-day crisis, not a historical phenomenon or third-world issue. Identifying four types of slavery—chattel slavery, debt bondage, forced labor, and sex slavery—he examines the efforts and failures of governments to address them. He explores the p...

About the Panel: Iraq and Syria have become major sources of instability in the Middle East, drawing in Islamic extremists from around the world, sending floods of refugees outside of their borders, and seeing genocide at the hands of the Islamic State. The societies of both Iraq and Syria have suffered much from Baathist politics and ideology, which has in many ways set the stage for much of the...

About the Lecture: Mr. Maibach will share 10 lively stories of ethics, strategy and decision-making drawn from his 18 years as Vice President of Global Government Affairs at the Intel Corporation. These stories sometimes involve the first four CEOs of Intel – Dr. Robert Noyce, Dr. Gordon Moore, Dr. Andrew Grove, and Dr. Craig Barrett. These are three of the four founders of the company. Dr. Noyce...

About the Lecture: In a gathering trend previously discounted by some analysts, China is building the means to achieve global military power projection. By the 2030s China's People's Liberation Army will have robust and growing capabilities in the areas of maritime and airmobile global power projection, and will be contesting control of the Earth-Moon system. The United States can continue to dete...

This event is a part of the Global Impact Discussion Series by founder and moderator Patricia Schouker, IWP alumna. About the Book: This highly accessible book provides new material and a fresh perspective on American National Intelligence practice, focusing on the first fifty years of the twentieth century, when the United States took on the responsibilities of a global superpower during the firs...

About the Lecture: Amidst the collapse of the “socialist paradise” of Venezuela, expanding bloodshed in Nicaragua, refugees fleeing Central American gang extortion, the election of a leftist populist president in violence-torn Mexico, and Chinese and Russian advances across the region, Dr. Ellis draws the conclusion: The U.S. needs a strategic concept for what it is trying to achieve in Latin Amer...

About the Book: Nationalism is the issue of our age. From Donald Trump's "America First" politics to Brexit to the rise of the right in Europe, events have forced a crucial debate: Should we fight for international government, or should the world's nations keep their independence and self-determination? In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony contends that a world of sovereign nations is the on...