Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of the Endowment's U.S. Leadership Project, will be the keynote speaker at NPCA's 2004 annual meeting on October 25 in Chicago.

An expert on the dynamics of power in the post-Cold War world, Kagan writes extensively on domestic politics and U.S. strategy and diplomacy, including foreign policy, military strategy and the defense budget. His latest book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, a New York Times and Washington Post bestseller, analyzes the historical causes of the gulf between European and American perspectives on power and the forces that seem to be inexorably widening the rift.

Kagan writes a monthly column in the Washington Post and is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and the New Republic. He is the author of Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990, and co-editor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy.

This year, NPCA will hold its annual meeting October 24-25 in Chicago, where NPCA members and guests will convene for forum sessions covering subjects from creating and sustaining business growth and eBusiness, to the political outlook for the 2004 General Elections.

For more information on NPCA's 2004 annual meeting, contact Dorothy Brawner at 202-462-6272 or dbrawner@paint.org.