BRATTLEBORO — On Sunday, Oct. 25, from 4 to 5:30 p.m., Windham World Affairs Council will host Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith in a Zoom webinar on “U.S. National Security and the Election: What Is at Stake.”
Galbraith will discuss how the choices U.S. voters make will affect national security interests with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, NATO, Europe, the Near East, Iran, China, Russia, and the wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and against terrorism.
The talk, followed by a community discussion held via Zoom, is free, but registration is required via a link at windhamworldaffairscouncil.org.
Galbraith's 30-year career in public service includes serving as the first U.S. ambassador to Croatia, an assistant secretary general for the United Nations in Afghanistan in 2009, and as a cabinet member in East Timor's first transitional government from 2000 tp 2001.
He was a senior professional staff member with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and a Vermont state senator.
A resident of Townshend, he is the author of two critically acclaimed books on the Iraq War, including the best-selling The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.
Since 2013, Galbraith has been engaged in several mediation projects involving the Syrian opposition and the Syrian Kurds. He made 15 trips to northeast Syria since 2014, including in 2019, just after Turkey invaded the country.
At the request of the Syrian Kurdish Administration, he has been working to find a solution for the 10,000 foreign (neither Syrian nor Iraqi) women and children currently detained by the Islamic State (ISIS) in northeast Syria. In 2019, he rescued three German children and one U.S. child who had been held in the ISIS camps.
With his annual talks at the WWAC, Galbraith continues a tradition that his father, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, established.