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After more than a decade of civil war involving major interventions from foreign powers, over the past week a rebel alliance incredibly rapidly gained control of city after city and ultimately forced the stunning downfall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. While much of the Syrian population is jubilant at the fall of a hated despot and Assad has fled to Moscow, the rest of the world is left to ponder what comes next in this fragile region. The rebel alliance that has claimed victory includes self-proclaimed pro-democracy fighters as well as designated foreign terrorist groups, adding to the uncertainty for the future of Syria. Join Richard Fontaine, Marie Harf, Michael C. Horowitz, and Brendan O’Leary for this timely virtual discussion of what happened in Syria and what comes next.
SPEAKERS
Richard Fontaine is the Chief Executive Officer of CNAS. He served as President of CNAS from 2012–19 and as Senior Fellow from 2009–12. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council (NSC), and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fontaine served as foreign policy advisor to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently as the minority deputy staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Prior to that, he served as Associate Director for Near Eastern Affairs at the NSC from 2003–04. He also worked on Southeast Asian issues in the NSC’s Asian Affairs directorate. At the State Department, Fontaine worked for the deputy secretary and in the department’s South Asia bureau. Fontaine began his foreign policy career as a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, focusing on the Middle East and South Asia. He also spent a year teaching English in Japan. Fontaine currently serves as executive director of the Trilateral Commission and on the Defense Policy Board. He has been an adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. A native of New Orleans, Fontaine graduated summa cum laude with a BA in international relations from Tulane University. He also holds an MA in international affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, and he attended Oxford University. He is the author of Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power with Robert D. Blackwill.
Marie Harf comes to Penn with two decades of varied experience in the U.S. federal government, higher education, media, and politics. Previously she worked as senior advisor for strategic communications to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, as the foreign policy director on Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and as a Middle East analyst and spokesperson at the Central Intelligence Agency. She has also held senior roles at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and for Congressman Seth Moulton's political organization. Since 2017, Harf has been an on-air commentator for Fox News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University with concentrations in Jewish Studies and Russian and Eastern European Studies, and a master's degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia.
Michael C. Horowitz is Director of Perry World House and Richard Perry Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also Senior Fellow in Innovation and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2022 to 2024, Professor Horowitz served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities. He is the author of The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics, and the co-author of Why Leaders Fight. He won the Karl Deutsch Award given by the International Studies Association for early career contributions to the fields of international relations and peace research. He has published in a wide array of peer reviewed journals and popular outlets. His research interests include the intersection of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics with global politics, military innovation, the role of leaders in international politics, and geopolitical forecasting methodology. Professor Horowitz worked for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He is a life member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Horowitz received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and his B.A. in political science from Emory University.
Brendan O'Leary BA (Oxon), MA UPenn (hon), PhD (LSE), DArts (UCC, hon), FRSA, MRIA (hon), is an Irish, European Union, and US citizen, and since 2003 the Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, co-author, and co-editor of thirty books and collections, and the author or co-author of hundreds of articles or chapters in peer-reviewed journals, university presses, encyclopedia articles, and other forms of publication, including op-eds. His three-volume study, A Treatise on Northern Ireland,published by Oxford University Press, was positively reviewed in the Dublin Review of Books, the Irish News, and the Irish Times, and in April 2020 it received the James S. Donnelly Sr. best book prize in History and Social Science of the American Conference on Irish Studies, and paperback copies were published the same year. In 2021 he was one of the co-authors of the Final Report of the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland(The Constitution Unit, UCL). He held a Fulbright Fellowship at the National University of Ireland-Galway, in 2021-22 writing a book, Making Sense of a United Ireland, which was published by Penguin in Dublin on September 1 2022. It received the Brian Farrell best book prize of the Political Studies Association of Ireland in 2023.
