This event has been rescheduled as a virtual event on June 15 at 7:30 p.m.

With the nation engulfed in a perpetual election cycle, nerve-rattling clashes, and upheavals that some see as sparking incipient insurgencies, Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory, asks what impact the past generation of presidents — Clinton, the two Bushes, Obama, Trump, and Biden — have actually had on the rise and fall of American power and what roller-coaster rides lie just around the corner. Come along with Kaplan as he takes a deep dive into Washington’s relations with the rest of the world — with allies, adversaries, and fence-straddlers, the various regions, the hotspots, and the ominous rumblings in areas that once were calm.

About Fred Kaplan

 Fred Kaplan — described by the New York Times as "a rare combination of defense intellectual and pugnacious reporter" — is the Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of six critically acclaimed and bestselling books. In his columns, essays, interviews and public speeches, Kaplan brings more than 40 years of experience as an observer and analyst of the foreign- and defense-policy scene, honing an insider’s grasp of its intricacies and an outsider’s sense of its broad contours, opportunities and dangers.  

Before joining Slate in 2002, Kaplan was a staff reporter for the Boston Globe, working as the paper’s defense correspondent (1983-91), during which he was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a special Sunday magazine on the nuclear arms race.