The Northern Plains Ethics Institute and the NDSU Department of Political Science are set to host a public forum featuring Roby Barrett of the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. The event, “U.S. Strategic Interests, the Ukraine War and Thinking Global,” is scheduled for Wednesday, Oct. 12, at 3:30 p.m. in Morrill Hall room 105.

The forum is also available through Zoom.

According to Barrett, understanding the present within the context of the past is key to projecting future developments. In a 2017 Special Operations Command briefing Barrett said, “Russia without the Ukraine and the Baltics is a regional power; with them it’s an empire.”

Barrett is a fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Forum at Cambridge University and a scholar with the Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C. He wrote “The Greater Middle East and the Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy under Eisenhower and Kennedy, 1958–1963,” and is recognized for his expertise, experience and publications on the Middle East. Originally trained as a Russian and Soviet expert during the Cold War, he served as an intelligence analyst in the Eastern European intelligence branch of the U.S. government where his writing was published in the Presidential Daily Brief. Later, he worked on intelligence collection issues related to Soviet weapons develop and proliferation. He is an expert on Soviet and Russian relations in the Middle East.

Barrett graduated from the two-year Middle East studies and Arabic language program at the Foreign Service Institute, Washington, D.C. and Tunis, Tunisia, and earned his doctorate in Middle Eastern and South Asian history from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Arts in Russian history from Baylor University and a Master of Arts in political science focusing on Eastern European politics.

For additional information, contact Dennis Cooley, NPEI director, at NDSU.NPEI@ndsu.edu or 701-231-7038.

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