The Common Good hosted an important discussion with the highly respected journalist David Rohde on how to get U.S. policy “right” in the Middle East.
The winding down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has not ended U.S. and world interests in the Middle East. The civil war in Syria and a coup in Egypt have now further destabilized the rapidly changing region.
David Rohde has argued that U.S. military power in the region is limited, so that empowering civilian institutions may be the critical way forward for our foreign policy. Can Muslim moderates, not Americans, eradicate militancy? Rohde led a discussion about how to make U.S. policy more effective in the region.
David Rohde, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, is a foreign affairs columnist for Reuters and The Atlantic. From 1996 to 2011, he worked as a reporter for The New York Times. He is the co-author of A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides, written with his wife Kristen Mulvihill, and the author of Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica. David won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for a series of stories in The Christian Science Monitor that helped uncover the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. He won his second in 2009 as part of a team of New York Times reporters for their coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
