Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian, professor of classics, and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which are Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, which Professor Hanson edited, and The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, a volume of his essays.Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.He is also cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, has served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics, and is a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
In Tunisia on December 17, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi protested the harassment he had suffered at the hands of police by committing suicide by setting himself ablaze. Since then, the governments of Tunisia and Egypt have been overthrown. A civil war has broken out in Libya. The king of Jordan has dismissed his cabinet and protests have taken place in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. What has happened? Hanson and Berkowitz analyze the causes of these events (including the role of social networking) and discuss possible outcomes for the Middle East states enmeshed in popular unrest. They evaluate the implications for Israel and conclude with an assessment of President Obama's handling of these events and how the United States should respond to the ongoing unrest.