Steven Simon is the senior research analyst at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in International Studies at MIT. He served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama administrations and has held senior positions at the Department of State. He has authored several books on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East including co-authoring  The Age of Sacred Terror, winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for best book in international relations. Steven has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico, New York Review of Books, Survival, and Haaretz, and has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, CNN and al Jazeera.

James M. Lindsay is senior vice president, director of studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he oversees the work of the more than six dozen fellows in CFR’s David Rockefeller Studies Program as well as CFR’s eleven fellowship programs. He has written widely on the American foreign policymaking process. His most recent book, coauthored with Ivo H. Daalder, is The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership. His previous book with Ambassador Daalder, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, was awarded the 2003 Lionel Gelber Prize. He has been a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Texas, and in 1996–97 served as director for global issues and multilateral affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. Lindsay writes the blog The Water’s Edge and hosts the weekly podcast, The President’s Inbox.