The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
As the initial promise of the Arab uprisings has collapsed and curdled, many have revisited nagging questions posed by political dysfunction in the Arab world. Special guest Michael Hanna, Senior Fellow of The Century Foundation joins MEI to discuss the question of whether or not the Arab uprisings were a failure and what this all means for the new Biden Administration.
Moderated by MEI Faculty Director Tarek Masoud, Sultan Qaboos Bin Said of Oman Professor of International Relations.
Michael Wahid Hanna is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. Hanna works on issues of international security, international law, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia. He is the co-author of Hybrid Actors: Armed Groups and State Fragmentation in the Middle East (2019) and co-editor of Arab Politics Beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism (2017), Order from Ashes: New Foundations for Security in the Middle East (2018), and Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East (2019).