Topic: Ukraine War

Radek Sikorski

Radosław ‘Radek’ Sikorski is a senior statesman and acclaimed expert and speaker on geopolitics.  In June 2019, he was elected as a member of the European Parliament. He is Chairman of the EU-US delegation for the Parliament.

Radek was Poland’s Minister of Defence (2005–2007), Foreign Minister (2007–2014), and Speaker of Parliament (Marshall of the Sejm) (2014–2015). As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Sikorski was the Polish signatory of the Treaty of Lisbon, in 2007. Together with Carl Bildt, he launched the EU Eastern Partnership. He proposed and helped to set up the European Endowment for Democracy.  He negotiated and signed the Poland-Russia regional visa-free regime, Poland-U.S. missile defence agreement, and—together with foreign ministers of Germany and France—the accord between the pro-EU opposition and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.

In his earlier career, he worked as a journalist for The Observer and The Spectator and in 1986 was a war correspondent in Afghanistan. In 1989, he reported on the conflict in Angola.  Radek is the author of several books, including ‘Dust of the Saints and The Polish House: An intimate history of Poland‘ and “Poland could be Better‘ (2018).

Foreign Policy named him one of its 100 global thinkers for “telling the truth even when it’s not diplomatic.”.  He is a member of the Steering Committee for the Bilderberg Group.

He is also associated with the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at CSIS – Centre for Strategic and International Studies and is a senior fellow at the Center of European Studies at Harvard University. Radek previously provided expertise and strategic insights on geopolitics with the Eurasia group.  He is a Senior Network Member at the European Leadership Network

John J. Mearsheimer

John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point (1970), has a PhD in political science from Cornell University (1981), and has written extensively about security issues and international politics. Among his six books, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001, 2014) won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize; and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (with Stephen M. Walt, 2007), made the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into twenty-four languages.

His latest book is The Great Delusion: Liberal Ideals and International Realities (2018), which won the 2019 Best Book of the Year Award from the Valdai Discussion Conference, Moscow.  He has written numerous articles and op-eds that have appeared in International Security, London Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, and The New York Times. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020, he won the James Madison Award, which is given once every three years by the American Political Science Association to “an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science.”