Faith Angle Forum Highlight: Michael Gerson and Elliott Abrams Debate U.S. Foreign Policy and Islam
With tensions high in the Middle East, there is a range of opinions among scholars, journalists, and public officials about how the United States should respond to the foreign policy challenges it faces in the region. During a discussion at the November 2014 Faith Angle Forum, two former members of the Bush Administration—Elliott Abrams, now Senior Fellow of Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Michael Gerson, Washington Post opinion writer—debated the United States’s approach to Iran and how best to address Islamic extremism. Shadi Hamid, Fellow of the Center for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution, also took part in the exchange.
In the first clip, Gerson, Abrams, and Hamid debate the merits of the United States’s outreach to Iran, as well as the theological tensions within Islam that have geopolitical implications:
(click here to download clip)
In the second clip, Gerson and Abrams debate how the United States might effectively combat Islamic extremism:
(click here to download clip)
These clips were part of the question-and-answer session following Abrams’s and Hamid’s presentation titled “Religious Conflict and the Future of the Middle East.” Click here for a full transcript of the presentations and discussion, which includes the two exchanges above.
Audio from all sessions of the November 2014 Faith Angle Forum, along with full transcripts and more information about participants, can be found here.
