“Be it Resolved: That maintaining sole superpower status is no longer in the best interests of the U.S.”

S.J. Quinney College of Law, Sutherland Moot Courtroom
What is United States’ proper role in international affairs?  Advocates of a more humble role for the U.S. argue that American world dominance is unwise and unsustainable. Conversely, to many people who support active engagement with foreign affairs, it may be that the U.S. is the sole nation with the ability to fill the role as “the world’s policeman.”

On October 24, Nora Bensahel, Deputy Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Tom Farer, University Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, will argue for and against the U.S.’s role as the world’s only superpower in the 30th Annual Fordham Debate, to be held in the Sutherland Moot Courtroom at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. The debate will be moderated by Kirk Jowers, Director of the U’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and Federal Relations.

1 Hour of CLE Credit, email communications@law.utah.edu

Debaters: Nora Bensahel & Tom Farer
Moderated by Kirk Jowers

Dr. Nora Bensahel is Deputy Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.  She recently co-authored The Seven Deadly Sins of Defense Spending, Hard Choices: Responsible Defense in an Age of Austerity, and Sustainable Pre-eminence: Reforming the U.S. Military at a Time of Strategic Change. Her other research interests include stability operations, counterinsurgency, civilian capacity for operations abroad, and coalition and alliance operations. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, where she teaches M.A. classes and received the Alumni Leadership Council Teaching Award.

Tom Farer, University Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Tom Farer, dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver from 1996 to 2010, is the former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS), the first American ever to head a principal organ of the OAS. He has also served as president of the University of New Mexico. Currently he is honorary professor of Peking University and director of the Center for China-United States Cooperation. Within the United States government, he has served as special assistant first to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and then to the assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs. He has taught law at Columbia University, American University, Rutgers, Tulane and Harvard and international relations at Cambridge University, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. And he has been a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations (of which he is currently a member), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Fellow of the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Kirk L. Jowers is the Director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics and Federal Relations. He also is an Associate Professor and the 2007 recipient of the University of Utah’s Par Excellence Award. In addition, he is a partner in the Washington, DC, law firm Caplin & Drysdale, Acting Chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Strengthening Utah’s Democracy, and a Member of the Utah Constitutional Revision Commission. Mr. Jowers has provided legal and political advice to state and national political parties, more than 30 congressional and gubernatorial candidates, Fortune 500 corporations, non-profit organizations, and three presidential campaigns. Described by the Salt Lake Tribune as the “most quoted man in Utah,” he is a frequent media commentator and lecturer on politics, campaign finance laws, government ethics, and the First Amendment and is the author of several publications.