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Please join us for a special installment of Polar Bearings, co-sponsored by the Association of ÌÇÐÄvlog Friends. We will hear from Aaron Miller, who is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Like some modern day Gulliver, America is more often than not wandering around in a region it doesn’t understand, tied up by powers big and small and burdened by its own illusions. What are US interests and what’s the most effective way to protect them? Join Aaron David Miller as he reflects on lessons learned from traveling the negotiator’s highway.

Gulliver’s Troubles: America and the Middle East

Program Details:

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

11:00 a.m. Doors Open

11:30 a.m. Program Begins

1:00 p.m. Program Ends

Location:

Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center

239 Maine Street, Brunswick, ME 04011

Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on U.S. foreign policy. He has written five books, including his most recent, The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President (Palgrave, 2014) and The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam, 2008), and hosts Carnegie Connects, Carnegie’s premier live podcast. He received his PhD in Middle East and U.S. diplomatic history from the University of Michigan in 1977.

Between 1978 and 2003, Miller served at the State Department as an historian, analyst, negotiator, and advisor to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the senior advisor for Arab-Israeli negotiations. He also served as the deputy special Middle East coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations, senior member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and in the office of the historian. He has received the department’s Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards.

Miller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and formerly served as resident scholar at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has been a featured presenter at the World Economic Forum and leading U.S. universities. Between 2003 and 2006 he served as president of Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance reconciliation and coexistence. From 2006 to 2019, Miller was a public policy scholar; vice president for new initiatives, and director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Miller’s articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. He is a frequent commentator on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and Sirius XM radio.