Thursday, August 12, 2021 @ 1:00 PM PST | 4:00 PM EST World Affairs Council of Orange County Presents: The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint Prepare for the Webinar by Purchasing the Book Today! Synopsis Russia and China are both believed to have “grand strategies” — detailed sets of national security goals backed by means, and plans, to pursue them. In the United States, policy makers have tried to articulate similar concepts but have failed to reach a widespread consensus since the Cold War ended. While the United States has been the world’s prominent superpower for over a generation, much American thinking has oscillated between the extremes of isolationist agendas versus interventionist and overly assertive ones. Drawing on historical precedents and weighing issues such as Russia’s resurgence, China’s great rise, North Korea’s nuclear machinations, and Middle East turmoil, Michael O’Hanlon presents a well‑researched, ethically sound, and politically viable vision for American national security policy. He also proposes complementing the Pentagon’s set of “4+1” pre‑existing threats with a new “4+1”: biological, nuclear, digital, climatic, and internal dangers. Panelist Biography Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow, and director of research, in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He co-directs the Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology; the Defense Industrial Base working group; and the Africa Security Initiative within the Foreign Policy program, as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown universities, a professional lecturer at George Washington University, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O’Hanlon was also a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. O’Hanlon has written several hundred op-eds in newspapers and has appeared on television or spoken on the radio some 4,000 times since September 11, 2001. In 2021, O’Hanlon was named one of Washingtonian’s “Most Influential People” in national security and defense. O’Hanlon was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1994. He also worked previously at the Institute for Defense Analyses. His doctorate from Princeton is in public and international affairs; his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, also from Princeton, are in the physical sciences. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Congo/Kinshasa (the former Zaire) from 1982-84, where he taught college and high school physics in French. Earlier, he worked on a dairy farm in Upstate New York, where he grew up, and attempted (unsuccessfully) with a team of Princeton experimental physicists in the “Gravity Group” to disprove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity Moderator Biography Adam Twardowski is a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution, where he works closely with Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow and Director of Research and Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. Twardowski also works with Director and a Senior Fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining Brookings, Twardowski was a National Security Fellow at Third Way, a national think tank […]