Kori Schake

On a normal week Kori Schake is on a screen somewhere, telling a television host why threatening an ally is a worse idea than it sounds. She runs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, which means she sits at the center of the Washington argument about what American power is for and whether it still works. Her answer tends to be uncomfortable for whoever is in charge.

The current version of that argument is about NATO, and about a president who treats alliances like overdue invoices. Schake's line is direct: bluffing has a price. "Threatening allies with abandonment will encourage Russia and other bad guys to test whether we will actually defend our allies if they are attacked," she has warned. She calls the broader effect a "chaos premium" - the unpredictability tax America pays when even its friends cannot guess what it will do next.

What makes her worth listening to is not the talking points. It is that she helped build the thing she now defends. In the 1990s she was a NATO desk officer on the Joint Staff, working German unification and the alliance's awkward search for a purpose after the Cold War ended and the obvious enemy went away. Later, on the National Security Council, she helped conceptualize NATO's Allied Command Transformation and the NATO Response Force. She is, in other words, criticizing a structure she personally wired together.

Sonoma to the Situation Room

She grew up in a small town in Sonoma County, California, the daughter of a Pan Am pilot. The flight path from there ran through Stanford, where she studied international relations under a professor named Condoleezza Rice, and then to the University of Maryland, where she collected an MPA, a master's, and a PhD in government. Her doctoral advisor was Thomas Schelling, the Nobel laureate who more or less invented modern deterrence theory. It is hard to design a better apprenticeship for someone who would spend her career thinking about how nations threaten, reassure, and miscalculate.

The government years stacked up across three administrations and three institutions. Pentagon first, from 1990, on NATO and the most significant realignment of U.S. forces and bases worldwide since 1950. Then the National Security Council during George W. Bush's first term, as director for defense strategy and requirements. Then a stint as deputy director for policy planning at the State Department in 2007 and 2008, where she ran a study on what it would take to "transform" State into an agency that could actually fuse political, economic, and military strategy. The verdict, lightly summarized: a lot.

The Republican who said no

Schake advised John McCain's 2008 campaign on foreign and defense policy, and Rudy Giuliani's before that. She is a Republican by formation and temperament - a believer in American strength, alliances, and credible commitments. Which is exactly why her 2020 break landed. She signed the statement of more than 130 former Republican national security officials declaring Donald Trump unfit for a second term, and she endorsed Joe Biden. The argument was not partisan conversion. It was that party loyalty should not override strategy, and that a leader who corrodes alliances is a strategic problem regardless of the letter after his name.

In 2021 Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed her to the commission charged with renaming Department of Defense items that honored the Confederacy - a small, unglamorous job about what a military chooses to celebrate, which is the kind of question she finds interesting precisely because most people find it boring.

The teacher and the writer

Between the government posts she has taught nearly everywhere that matters in this field: Stanford, West Point - where she held the Distinguished Chair of International Security Studies - Johns Hopkins SAIS, the National Defense University, and Maryland. She was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and, before AEI, deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. The classroom habit shows in the writing. As a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a fixture in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Times, the Journal, and the Post, she has a knack for making the machinery of strategy legible without dumbing it down.

Her central scholarly idea lives in a book called Safe Passage. The puzzle: history offers exactly one example of a dominant power handing the baton to a rising one without a war - Britain to the United States. She spent a book figuring out why that transition stayed peaceful and what it suggests for a world where the United States is no longer the only giant on the field. It is the rare academic monograph that doubles as a warning label.

A house divided, happily

There is a family footnote that explains a lot about how she operates. Her younger sister, Kristina Schake, is a Democratic political operative who has worked with Michelle Obama and on Hillary Clinton's campaign. The Schake sisters sit on opposite sides of nearly every domestic fight in America and remain, by all accounts, very close. If you want a small model for how to disagree about politics without ending the relationship, the dinner table is a decent place to start.

The throughline across all of it - the Pentagon desk, the NSC, the op-eds, the book about hegemony, the break with her own party - is a single quiet thesis. The people best positioned to defend the liberal order are the ones willing to criticize it most honestly. Schake has spent a career proving she is one of them.