# 3 – September 12, 2012. The George Washington University’s Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science, speaks with F. Gregory Gause III, professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Gause is most recently the author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge University Press), Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East (Council on Foreign Relations), and “Why Middle East Studies missed the Arab spring” (Foreign Affairs). Gause and Lynch discuss the critique of Middle East Studies and the literature on authoritarian persistence, the stability of Saudi Arabia, and how the conflict in Syria is shaping regional politics.