Max Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and the Los Angeles Times, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and many other publications. His latest book, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, has been hailed as a “magisterial survey of technology and war” by the New York Times.

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (2002), The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the Twenty-first Century (2006), and Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government (2007).

Douglas Murray is a bestselling author, commentator and director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, a London-based think tank which focuses on terrorism and extremism within the UK. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed, Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. He appears regularly across the BBC and other broadcast media. Last year the leading Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat wrote: “Whether one agrees with him or not Murray has made a valuable contribution to the global battle of ideas.”

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy. Bremmer has held research and faculty positions at Columbia University, the EastWest Institute, the Hoover Institution, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the World Policy Institute. Bremmer’s five books include The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall, selected by the Economist as one of the best books of 2006. He is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune and Slate, contributing editor at the National Interest, and a political commentator on CNN, Fox News and CNBC among others.

Ellen Laipson is president and CEO of the Henry L. Stimson Center, which she joined in 2002 after nearly 25 years of government service. She served as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, at the US Mission to the United Nations, and on the National Security Council staff.

Matthew Parris was born in South Africa and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Parris was a British MP who worked for Margaret Thatcher in opposition and became a conservative politician. He now writes for the Times of London and the Spectator and is a broadcaster for the BBC.