The Front Row Podcast #78- Prof. Michael O' Hanlon : 250 Years of America's Defense Policy
Michael O'Hanlon is one of America's foremost defence policy scholars. He holds the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defence and Strategy and serves as Director of Research in the Foreign Policy programme at the Brookings Institution, where he specialises in US defence strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy.
O'Hanlon completed all his degrees at Princeton University — a bachelor's in physics, a master's, and a PhD in international affairs — and went on to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he taught physics in French. He later served as an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office and was a member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board.
His newest book, timed to coincide with America's 250th anniversary, is To Dare Mighty Things: US Defence Strategy Since the Revolution, published by Yale Press in 2026.
You can buy a copy of his book here - https://amzn.to/4bKPmaq
His previous works include The Art of War in an Age of Peace and Military History for the Modern Strategist, among more than a dozen books spanning NATO, nuclear arms, land warfare, and US-China relations.
O'Hanlon has appeared on television or spoken on radio over 4,000 times since 9/11, and his writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among many others.
This is the 78th episode Of The Front Row Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 — Introduction
- 01:37 — Grand Strategy vs. Defence Strategy: What's the Difference?
- 06:50 — George Washington's Guerrilla Instinct: How the Revolutionary War Shaped America
- 11:45 — The Founding Fathers Were Not Minimalists
- 15:10 — The War of 1812: Punching Up at the World's Number One Power
- 18:50 — Was America Ever Really Isolationist?
- 21:10 — The Uncomfortable Ethics of American Expansion
- 30:15 — How World War II Made America a Superpower
- 32:55 — Three Wars That Built a Nation
- 34:30 — The Cold War Was Scarier Than We Remember
- 37:45 — Vietnam: America's Worst War — and Why Lee Kuan Yew Still Defended It
- 40:20 — The Cold War Was About More Than Containing Communism
- 42:30 — The End of the Cold War: Triumph or Anxiety?
- 46:05 — 9/11, Fear, and the Road Into Iraq
- 49:30 — The Paradox of American Power: Winning the Grand Game While Losing the Wars
- 51:20 — Nixon's Art of Losing Without Admitting It
- 53:35 — Iraq: What Went Wrong and What Didn't
- 55:15 — Trump Through a Historical Lens: A 19th-Century President in the 21st Century
- 56:40 — If You Had 15 Minutes With Trump, What Would You Say?
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