Stories

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 […]

In his lunch keynote speech, Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, outlined a strategy of “offshore balancing,” which he believes is superior to the current strategy of liberal hegemony. Under a grand strategy of offshore balancing, the United States would focus on […]

This panel explored the challenges likely to face the next president of the United States and offered some suggestions for how he or she can best steer American foreign policy over the next four years. Panelists included Richard K. Betts, the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University; Barry R. […]

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.” […]

“Why is innovation important?” This deceptively simple question sparked a wide-ranging and fruitful discussion last week in Washington, DC, as Stand Together Trust brought together a panel of technology policy experts to talk to a sold-out crowd about the future of innovation. The conversation, moderated by the Institute’s senior research and policy analyst Eric Alston, […]

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: […]

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 […]

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 […]