Taking to Twitter to Continue the Conversation after President Obama's Speech

Thursday at 11:40am EDT, President Obama will deliver a speech on events in the Middle East and North Africa and the United States' policy in the region. The speech will be live-streamed from the State Department and available to anyone at WhiteHouse.gov/live.

Immediately afterwards, the live-stream will switch to a follow-up Twitter chat with Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, where anyone will be able to pose questions and reactions via Twitter.  

NPR's Andy Carvin (@acarvin) and Foreign Policy's Marc Lynch (@abuaardvark), two experts who bring both a deep understanding of foreign policy and extensive online networks, will facilitate a world-wide conversation that will include participants from the Middle East and North Africa.  As Andy explains:

Rather than come up with all the questions ourselves, we'd like to invite you to help us craft the questions. If you're on Twitter and want to submit a question, please post a tweet with your question and include the hashtag #MEspeech in the tweet. You can pose your question before or during the speech. We won't be able to get to every question, of course, so we encourage everyone to follow the #MEspeech hashtag and join the broader conversation about the speech on Twitter.

Folks at the White House (@whitehouse) will be keeping an eye on the #MESpeech hashtag as well, so be sure to use that to share thoughts before, during and after the speech.

Don't forget: Tune into WhiteHouse.gov/live tomorrow at 11:40am and stick around afterwards for your opportunity to continue the conversation about this important topic.

CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Marc Lynch is the author of the recently released CNAS report Upheaval: U.S. Policy Toward Iran in a Changing Middle East.