Michael R. Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald, professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, will discuss relations between the United States and Russia at Lunch with the League on Tuesday.

Lunch with the League starts at noon Tuesday, April 18, in the Social Hall of the Oak Ridge Unitarian Universalist Church. The church is located at 809 Oak Ridge Turnpike.

Fitzgerald served on the faculty of the University of Missouri before he joined UT in Knoxville in 1978. He received his master’s and doctorate degrees in political science at the University of Oklahoma. After he graduated from the Honors College at Western Michigan University in 1969, he served in the U.S. Army, including a tour of duty in Vietnam with the 25th Infantry Division, during which he received two Bronze Star Medals for meritorious service, a press release said.

“Relations between the United States and the Russian Federation steadily have declined over the past two decades,” Fitzgerald said in the press release. “Tensions between the world’s most prominent nuclear powers have risen to levels unseen since the worst days of the Cold War. A survey of the causes and contours of the deteriorating current impasse in U.S.-Russian relations leads to the conclusion that we are well into a second Cold War fraught with all the uncertainty and danger that defined the first. Effectively dealing with Putin’s geopolitical strategy to, once again, make Russia internationally relevant requires realistic thinking about Russian history, culture, and politics.” [Read more…]