We will have a limited amount of briefing books available for purchase ($15 - cash or check only) or for checkout. If you wish to purchase a briefing book, visit the Service Desk.
Interested in Past Discussions?
Visit our Facebook Page below to watch past discussions from the 2024 series.
About the Program
Great Decisions, a project of the Foreign Policy Association, is a grassroots world affairs education program which brings together Americans from across the nation to discover and discuss foreign policy issues. Over the course of eight weeks, scholars will introduce each issue, and participants may explore their own views and those of the group.
PLEASE NOTE: Great Decisions 2025 will be presented in a hybrid format—offered in-person in MPL’s Balkansky Community Room, as well as livestreamed simultaneously online on both our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/manitowoclibrary) and YouTube channel (unless otherwise indicated).
This program is made possible with great sponsors like:
- League of Women Voters of Manitowoc County
- Manitowoc Public Library Foundation
- Manitowoc Public Library
- Lakeshore Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
And participants like you!
2025 Speakers & Topics
Upcoming Events:
February 3: U.S. Changing Leadership of the World Economy
Speaker: Pablo Toral, PhD, Beloit College
Topic: Over the past two presidential terms, the U.S. has strongly pivoted away from neoliberalism as a foreign economic policy approach.
February 10: After Gaza: American Policy in the Middle East
Speaker: Beth Dougherty, PhD, Beloit College
Topic: Analysts of American policy in 2025 have the unusual advantage of being able to assess the new president’s likely policies against the backdrop of what he did in his first term, four years earlier. The prognosis is not positive.
February 17: The Future of NATO and European Security
Speaker: Martin Farrell, PhD, Retired, Ripon College
Topic: Europe is frightened and frightening for the first time really since the 1980s, when nuclear sabers were rattling as the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) both deployed contending intermediate range missiles along the dividing line of the military alliances. With Russia’s continued barbarity in Ukraine there is no escaping that Vladimir Putin intends not to be “European”
February 24: International Cooperation on Climate Change
Speaker: Elizabeth Wheat, PhD, UW Green Bay
Topic: Over the past 30 years, climate change has become one of the central global challenges of the modern era, one that has hugely important consequences for the livability of the planet.
March 3: AI and American National Security
Speaker: Dave Schroeder, MS, MA, CISSP, CEH, UW Madison
Topic: Artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, is often claimed as an emerging technology that will disrupt all facets of society.
March 10: U.S.-China Relations
Speaker: Judd Kinzley, PhD, UW Madison
Topic: There is one thing that people can actually agree on across the aisle in Washington, DC: The United States is in a strategic competition with a rising China that poses a range of economic, political, and military security challenges.
March 17: India: Between China, the West, and the Global South
Speaker: Amitabh Pal, Journalist/former Editor of The Progressive, Adjunct Professor at Edgewood College, Madison
Topic: As the Republic of India marks its 75th anniversary in January 2025, the world’s most populous nation and largest democracy continues to defy simple categorization.
March 24: American Foreign Policy at a Crossroads
Speaker: Martin Farrell, PhD, Retired, Ripon College
Topic: The U.S., polarized and divided, faces a world overflowing with challenges, dangers, and uncertainties. Conflict and disorder have become the defining features of world politics.