CLINTON — Hamilton College will host the first Common Ground event in its 2022/2023 series when it hosts author, foreign-policy analyst, and Washington Post columnist Max Boot at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 25, at a free, public lecture in the Kirner-Johnson Building’s Bradford Auditorium. 

Boot will discuss the war in Ukraine and American foreign policy with Hamilton Professors Maurice Isserman and Ty Seidule.

The Common Ground program hosts speakers who provide cross-boundary dialogue on hot-button political issues. Previous speakers have included Karl Rove and David Axelrod, Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice, Mike Dubke ’92 and Marc Elias ’90, and Jim Messina and Reince Priebus, among others. 

Boot is a historian who has been called one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. In addition to being a columnist at the Washington Post, he is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Boot has been a CNN analyst and a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and other radio and television programs. In addition to being a Pulitzer finalist, he was named in 2018 one of America’s “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation. 

Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002, Boot was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal and, before that, an editor and writer at The Christian Science Monitor. He has also been a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Commentary, and other publications. 

The next Common Ground event will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 15. Nikolei Petro, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who served as special assistant for policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the U.S. Department of State and as temporary political attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the H.W. Bush administration, and Andrey Kozyrev, the former Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation will discuss the future of the Putin administration.

Hamilton Professors Alan Cafruny and Sharon Rivera will join the discussion.