Foreign Policy

John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Kathleen Hicks of the Center for Strategic and International Studies together evaluated U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War during this morning session at the Advancing American Security conference. They debated issues including nation-building and the best and worst foreign policy decisions of […]

This panel offered a glimpse into the experience of practitioners of U.S. foreign policy and the challenge of translating policy into the real world. The panel was moderated by Dan McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, and featured a conversation between retired Colonel Gian Gentile, now a senior historian at the RAND Corporation, and Chas […]

On May 18, retired Army colonel and military historian Andrew J. Bacevich gave a compelling—and alarming—speech about American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Addressing the Global War on Terror, he said, “We don’t know how to define it, don’t know how to win it. We don’t know how to end it.” […]

WASHINGTON, May 18, 2016 — Today, Stand Together Trust is hosting Advancing American Security: The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy, a day-long conference with the goal of bridging the gap between ideas and policy. Top scholars in the field will evaluate the U.S. approach to foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and discuss how […]

On Tuesday, May 10, the Institute of World Politics hosted a debate between Chris Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, and Paul Miller, associate director of the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin. The debate, which centered on the question of nation-building, was […]

Barry R. Posen is the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the author of Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. In October 2014, he sat down with Stand Together Trust’s vice president of research and policy, William […]

Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine. In his writings, he frequently argues that attempting to build democratic institutions through the use of outside military force—which the United States has repeatedly done—usually proves fruitless. He […]

Eugene Gholz is an associate professor of public affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. His work focuses primarily on the intersection of national security and economic policy. He previously served in the Pentagon as a senior advisor for manufacturing and industrial base policy and he is co-author of the textbook US Defense Politics: […]

Nation building is tremendously expensive. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reports that “approximately $113.1 billion has been appropriated for Afghanistan relief and reconstruction since 2002.” In total, the war has cost over $1 trillion, which is around $33,000 per Afghan citizen. SIGAR is an accountability agency that was created […]

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen has argued repeatedly that debts and deficits pose the greatest threat to our national security. The national debt currently stands at $18 trillion, and the federal government has been running budget deficits for well over a decade. One significant contributor to the rapid growth […]