President Joe Biden’s declaration that the withdrawal from Afghanistan puts an end to “an era of major military operations to remake other countries” adds further urgency to the question of what America’s military footprint in the Middle East should be. This is a central element in Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s forthcoming global posture review.

But does the United States need to have any permanent military bases in the Middle East at all? Not according to former Pentagon advisor Eugene Gholz, who argues in a Quincy Institute brief entitled Nothing Much to Do: Why America Can Bring All Troops Home From the Middle East that core U.S. interests in the region are safe, and as a result, the United States should begin significant withdrawals from the region and eventually close down all permanent bases there.

Join us for a debate between Gholz and Kirsten Fontenrose, former Senior Director for the Persian Gulf at the National Security Council, on the future U.S. military footprint in the Middle East. QI's Trita Pars will moderate.

Have efforts to make war more ethical — to ban torture and limit civilian casualties — only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? That is the controversial argument Professor Samuel Moyn makes in his new book Humane. Moyn, a professor at Yale University and Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute, looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless, he argues.

To discuss his thesis, Moyn will be joined by Princeton's Gary Bass, author of Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention. Their conversation will be moderated by the QI's Kelley Beaucar Vlahos.