Confronting Iran with panelists Reuel Marc Gerecht and Karim Sadjadpour
The Transatlantic Institute hosted a policy conference entitled 'Is there a new Middle East?'. Internationally renowned scholars and experts from the US, Europe and the Middle East came together to debate and offer insights and policy suggestions at this critical juncture- Transatlantic Institute
Bio
Ron Asmus
Dr. Ronald D. Asmus was appointed executive director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels in 2005. He previously worked as a senior transatlantic fellow at GMF's headquarters in Washington, DC. Dr. Asmus has written widely on U.S.–European relations and American foreign policy, as well as security and strategic issues in Central and Northern Europe, the wider Middle East, and the Black Sea region. He is the author of Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (Columbia University Press, 2002). Prior to joining GMF in 2002, Dr. Asmus worked as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1997 to 2000, he served as deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs in the Clinton administration. During that time he played a key role in developing Alliance policy at the Madrid and Washington NATO summits. Dr. Asmus has also worked as a senior analyst at RAND Corporation and Radio Free Europe.
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at AEI. An expert in Middle East affairs, he has focused since 9/11 on Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as on terrorism and intelligence. He is the author of "Know Thine Enemy: A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997) and "The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy" (AEI Press, 2004). He is a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard and a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, as well as a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other publications. Mr. Gerecht formerly held positions as the director of the Middle East Initiative for the Project for the New American Century and as a Middle Eastern specialist in the Central Intelligence Agency.
Karim Sadjadpour
Karim Sadjadpour is the International Crisis Group's Iran analyst, based in Tehran and Washington DC. Over the past three years he has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian, American, and European officials, as well as hundreds of interviews with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others.
He is a regular contributor to BBC World, CNN, National Public Radio, and PBS NewsHour, and has also written in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic. Sadjadpour has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, and spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations and Asia Society in New York.
He has degrees from the University of Michigan and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was a visiting fellow at the American University of Beirut, and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Fulbright scholarship. He has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and speaks Persian, Spanish, Italian, and conversant Arabic.