MIDDLEBURY — A U.S. ambassador’s decision to block a speech by Middlebury College scholar and NATO expert Stanley Sloan resulted in the cancellation of the entire conference where he was to deliver a keynote address last week. 
The action by Carla Sands, U.S. envoy to Denmark, prompted organizers to scrap the whole event marking the 70th anniversary of the historic alliance of North American and European nations, including the United States. 
Sloan, a visiting scholar at Middlebury and former CIA analyst, had been invited to speak at the international conference hosted by the American embassy and the Atlantic Council, a Danish think tank. 
However, he said he received word Dec. 7 from the secretary general of the Atlantic Council, Lars Bangert Struwe, that there had been a change in plans. 
“He basically said he was very sorry and he disagreed with the judgment of the ambassador, but the ambassador had said he had to remove me from the program,” Sloan said. “The embassy was providing a lot of the funding for the event and he was under a lot of pressure.” 
Struwe also released a statement saying that although he “never doubted that Mr. Sloan at our conference would deliver an unpolitical and objective lecture,” he “had no other option” except to cancel the event in response to the U.S. ambassador’s objections. 
Sloan said he is certain he was disinvited because of his frequent criticism of the Trump administration’s attitude and policy toward NATO. 
“As somebody who has worked on NATO virtually my entire professional life, I have a lot of problems with the fact that not only did Trump not understand NATO, he obviously was unwilling to learn about it,” Sloan said. “That’s certainly been indicated by the fact that he makes the same erroneous claims now that he made when he became president.” 
In Sloan’s talk, which he has now published online, he planned to explore the future of NATO in the face of both internal and external challenges. He also intended to speak about the importance of liberal democracy, which he described as the guiding ideology behind the alliance. 
In addition to lecturing abroad, Sloan brings his foreign policy expertise to the two courses he offers at Middlebury. Next month will be his 16th year teaching during the college’s winter term, when students take one in-depth course for the month of January. This academic year’s offering is “American Power: Soft, Hard and Smart.” The other course he has taught is called “Transatlantic Relations.” 
In a statement from Sarah Ray, director of media relations, the college provided this response to the episode: 
“Middlebury faculty offer many viewpoints inside and outside of the classroom, and share their scholarship with a wide range of groups. The open exchange of ideas is at the core of academic freedom and is vital to the public dialogue of the national and global community.” 
Sloan said he found the cancellation of his talk to be a worrying sign about the state of U.S. democracy. 
“I’ve always thought that it was part of my responsibility to be critical and not just to be a mouthpiece for current American policy,” he said. “This is definitely a change — for the State Department program to censure an American speaker because of disagreements over policy.” 
For his part, Sloan said he has already received several offers to return to Denmark and lecture in the spring. So far, he has provisionally accepted invitations from Danish Atlantic Council, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Southern Denmark and the Nordic Dialogue. 
In the end, Sloan said he found the entire ordeal rather ironic. He believes that if his talk had proceeded as scheduled that it would have garnered very little international attention. 
“There might have been some debate at the meeting, there might have been some local press about my criticism of the administration, but it would have ended there and it wouldn’t have been the kind of blown up controversy that it’s been,” he said. “It’s really a black mark on the embassy, and on the State Department.”