Bonus Episode: behind the scenes at The Munk Debate on Foreign Wars

Roger Griffiths here, chair of the Monk Debates. Welcome to our post-mainstage debrief with Ricky Gurwitz, the managing director of the Monk Debates, who is responsible for putting together our big mainstage doohosh. What do we call these things, Ricky? It was a big debate, a couple thousand people, downtown Toronto. Let's just begin by reminding our audience what was the debate motion and who was on the stage.

So the debate resolution was be it resolved, don't go hunting monsters. You

can

see here. And it was all about John Quincy Adams. Famous quote that he gave when he was Secretary of State in 1821, I believe. And it was a warning to his fellow Americans that America does not go abroad for, you know, foreign expeditions to find conflicts with those it disagrees with. It stays at home. And I think a lot of people today feel that, well, rightfully so, that America has not heeded those warnings in the past three decades and the consequence of not listening to that warning has been disastrous. And so to argue that resolution, we had two kind of foreign policy giants. On one side, we had Victoria Nuland, who's had 35 years in State Department and as a career diplomat. She actually probably had the most foreign policy experience out of everyone on stage.

And she hasn't done a lot of public debates like this.

No, she hasn't. Well, she only left government about a year ago, so it was kind of nice to get that. This was her first

big kind of public event to talk about American foreign policy.

Yes. And it was also nice to hear because she's been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism with regards to Ukraine and Russia. She was quite instrumental in how America kind of led on that file back when Biden was president. And so she's taken a lot of criticism from the likes of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Wallace. So it was nice for her to set the record straight as she sees it, which she hasn't been able to do. So we paired her with former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. And on the other side, we had the returning duo of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walsh, who are since we had them in 2022, we had them for our debate on Ukraine and Russia, and they were fabulous. They've only gained more notoriety and attention in the, you know, ensuing four years, probably because Americans foreign policy or sorry, America's the American sentiment about how their foreign policy should be exercised has changed so much in those four years.

Yeah. And this Iran war obviously making this debate all the more relevant and a big reason why we chose the resolution. So just to remind viewers and listeners that if you are a Munk member, you can access a live stream of the debate depending on your donor level. And if you're listening to us and you want to dig into this media debate, there is a live stream pass that people can access the debate on demand and access future debates live as we broadcast them from our locations here in Toronto. Ricky, the purpose of these debrief episodes is to kind of lift the rope, so to speak, for our audience to understand a little bit about how we go about building these debates and what goes into them. So talk to us a little bit about