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The ongoing withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan raises many unanswered questions about the US presence in the so-called Greater Middle East, a region defined by strategists as spanning from Pakistan across the Persian Gulf.
Exactly how the United States will remain involved in Afghanistan remains unclear. Meanwhile, the US military presence in the Persian Gulf is increasingly coming into question too. Present military strategy calls for a shift of resources toward East Asia. Moreover, there are rising calls in Washington to reduce Pentagon spending generally, especially in the Middle East where the United States has struggled to achieve its foreign policy aims.
These unfolding events combine to create an inflection point for the United States, which has long considered itself a vital hegemon in the region. Mark Kukis will discuss these ongoing events and unfolding trends, outlining some likely scenarios for the United States and the region in the near term.
SPEAKER
Mark Kukis is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute and Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the Minerva Schools, where he teaches government. Kukis spent a decade as a journalist before joining academia, including three years covering the American occupation of Iraq for Time magazine from 2006 to 2009. Kukis also covered the early phase of the American intervention in Afghanistan as a freelance journalist and served as a White House correspondent for United Press International. His writings have also appeared in The New Republic and Aeon, among other places. He is the author of Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 (2011), an oral history of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as told entirely by Iraqis. Kukis grew up in the Dallas area and attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied journalism and government as an undergraduate. Kukis did his doctoral work at Boston University, where he studied US foreign policy and political history under Professor Andrew Bacevich. Kukis has been an invited speaker at RAND, Princeton University and Boston University and done numerous television and radio interviews discussing the Middle East and US foreign policy.
You can find his recent writings for the Quincy Institute here and on Twitter @markkukis.