Each year the Mershon Center for International Security Studies hosts a lecture to honor the memory of Joseph J. Kruzel Jr. (1945-1995.) Kruzel taught political science at the Ohio State University between episodes of public service that included briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, serving in the State Department delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in Helsinki, and joining the Clinton Administration in 1993 to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy.
In this role, Kruzel created Partnership for Peace, a program instituted in 1994 to build trust and cooperation between NATO and non-member states in Eastern Europe. He was sent to Bosnia as the Defense Department special envoy and chief negotiator on the US team working to end the Yugoslav Wars. In 1995, in the course of that mission, he was killed with two other US diplomats when their armored personnel carrier crashed into a ravine. President Clinton awarded him, posthumously, the Presidential Citizens Medal.
Past Kruzel Memorial Lectures include:
2023-24
Ivan Krastev, Chairman, Centre for Liberal Strategies, "Demography, Democracy and the Politics of the Last Man"
Watch Lecture on YouTube
2022-23
Fiona Hill, Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution
Watch "Geoffrey Parker and Fiona Hill: In Conversation," recorded before the Kruzel Lecture
2016-17
Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, "The Crisis of Liberal Democracy"
2014-15
Henry Nau, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, "Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy Under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan"
2013-14
Aaron Friedberg, professor of politics and international affairs, Princeton University, "A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia"
2012-13
Christopher Hill, Dean, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, "Trends in American Foreign Policy: What the Next Administration Will Face"
2010-11
Edward L. (Ted) Warner III, secretary of defense representative to New START and senior advisor for arms control and strategic stability, "New START Treaty and Beyond"
2008-09
Joseph Nye, Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at Harvard University, "The Powers to Lead"
2007-08
Strobe Talbott, president, Brookings Institution, "Election of the Century: The American Presidency and the World"
2006-07
William Perry, Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor at Stanford University and former Secretary of Defense
2004-05
Eliot Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, "Armchair Killers"
2003-04
Walter Slocombe, former director of national security and defense, Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq, and former undersecretary of defense for policy, "Future Security for Iraq"