MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury College Visiting Scholar, lecturer and author Stanley R. Sloan will examine the current challenges posed to the West’s values and interests in a talk at Ilsley Public Library on Jan. 6 at 7 p.m.
His talk, “Defense of the West,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public.
 Sloan’s talk will focus on external threats from Russia, Middle East turmoil, and radical Islamic terrorism, as well as emerging illiberal political tendencies in some European countries.
Sloan is a visiting scholar in political science at Middlebury College, a nonresident senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center of the Atlantic Council of the United States, and an associate fellow at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy. In 1999, he concluded government service as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) senior specialist in International Security Policy after 24 years in a variety of CRS research and management positions. He served previously as the first deputy national intelligence officer for Western Europe at the Central Intelligence Agency. The most recent edition of his book on transatlantic security relations, “Defense of the West: NATO, and European Union and the Transatlantic Bargain,” is forthcoming in 2016.