Thomas Wright is a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Strategy, Security, and Technology at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He previously served as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. He is the author of All Measures Short of War and coauthor, with Colin Kahl, of Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order. 

Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, former Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. He is the author of Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, (Cornell University Press 2014), Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Cornell University Press 1991), and The Sources of Military Doctrine (Cornell University Press 1984). The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University’s Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including “The Devastation of Gaza Was Inevitable,” Foreign Policy, Feb. 14, 2024; “Ukraine has a Breakthrough Problem,” Foreign Policy, Aug. 3, 2023; “Russia’s Rebound: How Moscow has partly recovered from its military setbacks,” Jan. 4, 2023; “Ukraine’s Implausible Theories of Victory: The Fantasy of Russian Defeat and the Case for Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, July 2022; “Europe Can Defend Itself,” Survival, December 2020; “The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony–Trump’s Surprising Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018; “It’s Time to Make Afghanistan Someone Else’s Problem,” The Atlantic, 2017; “Contain ISIS,” The Atlantic, 2015, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013; and “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, Summer, 2003. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he was appointed Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center. He is the 2017 recipient of the International Security Studies Section (ISSS), International Studies Association, Distinguished Scholar Award, and in 2019 received the Notre Dame International Security Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; and a Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.

Dr. Ronald J. Granieri is Professor of History and Chair in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College and a Senior Fellow at FPRI. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago, he has published on German History; European-American Relations; the Cold War; and contemporary politics and culture. He is the author of The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966 (Berghahn, 2003); co-editor of The Bondian Cold War: Global Connections of a Cold War Icon (Routledge 2023) and most recently of Adenauer’s Heirs: The CDU/CSU from Detente to Reunification (Oxford UP, 2025). All opinions are his own and not those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of War. 

Oliver Stuenkel is a senior fellow affiliated with the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also a Fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and an associate professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil. 

His research focuses on geopolitics and the global order, emerging powers, Brazilian foreign policy and Latin American politics and democracy. He is the author of several books on geopolitics, including The BRICS and the Future of Global Order and The Post-Western World, which have been translated into multiple languages. He is also a columnist for Foreign Policy and O Estado de S. Paulo, a commentator on Brazilian television and radio, and one of Latin America’s leading foreign policy analysts. 

His articles have been published in major international relations journals, including International Affairs, Global Governance, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Global R2P, and Conflict, Security and Development. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Financial Times, Global Times, Mail & Guardian, Times of India, The Hindu, Folha de S. Paulo, Valor Econômico, and O Globo. From 2016 to 2021, he was a columnist for El País. 

He has been a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, and the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) in Rome. Oliver holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Valencia in Spain, a master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Oliver speaks Portuguese, Spanish, English, German, and French. He lives in Washington, DC.