Next Baron's Briefing

The next Baron's Briefing. on Monday November 18th at 5 p.m. GMT, will be an online talk by former Reuters correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Roy Gutman entitled: Flying Blind: A Critique of American Policy in the Middle East.

Three U.S. presidents, including President-elect Donald Trump in his first term, have called for a drawdown of the U.S. presence in the Middle East and a pivot to Asia as a way to end America’s “forever wars”.Trump has said that the United States should never have been in the Middle East. But Roy comes to a different conclusion. Withdrawal will create a power vacuum that bad actors will rush to fill, but it won’t address the main reason for endless wars -- an incoherent policy that relies on kinetic force, not on political savvy.