foreign-policy
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Susan Glasser Has Spent a Career Reading the Room Where Power Lives
From a teenage internship on Capitol Hill to Moscow, Tora Bora, and the weekly churn of Washington, Susan Glasser built a career by watching what powerful people do before everyone agrees on what it means.
Danielle Pletka
Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she has shaped conservative thinking on the Middle East, Iran, and national security for more than two decades. A former senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer under Jesse Helms, she co-hosts the AEI podcast 'What the Hell Is Going On?' with Marc Thiessen, teaches at Georgetown, and appears regularly across major print and broadcast media.
Kori Schake
Kori Schake runs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and is one of Washington's most quoted voices on alliances, deterrence, and the future of NATO. A Stanford-trained scholar who studied under Condoleezza Rice, she spent a decade and a half inside the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department before becoming a leading public intellectual on grand strategy. She is the author of several books on hegemony and civil-military relations, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a Republican national security thinker known for breaking with her party over Donald Trump.
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is an American writer, columnist, and professor who has spent three decades refusing to sit in either political team's section. A fifth-generation Texan who began on the right at the Heritage Foundation and migrated toward New Deal economic nationalism, he co-founded the New America Foundation in 1999, wrote for The New Yorker, Harper's and The New Republic, and now teaches at the LBJ School at UT Austin while writing a column for Tablet. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The New Class War, Land of Promise and Hell to Pay, all of them circling one question: who actually runs the country, and what do they owe the people who don't.
Tom Nichols
Tom Nichols is a staff writer at The Atlantic, professor emeritus of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, and author of The Death of Expertise. A Cold War scholar who spent decades teaching strategy to military officers, he became one of America's most-read voices on the collapse of trust in experts and the fragility of democracy. He is also, improbably, a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion and a curmudgeonly New England cat guy who once played a fictional pundit on HBO's Succession.
Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute, and one of the most widely-read public intellectuals in economics and geopolitics. His newsletter Chartbook on Substack has over 181,000 subscribers and his books - including The Wages of Destruction, Crashed, and Shutdown - have reshaped how historians, economists, and policymakers understand financial crises, the Nazi economy, and global disorder. He popularized the term 'polycrisis' and co-hosts the Foreign Policy podcast Ones and Tooze. Known for his extraordinary output, analytical range, and willingness to publicly revise his views, Tooze is that rare figure who straddles academic history and live economic commentary with equal authority.
Mona Charen
Mona Charen is a syndicated political columnist, author, and podcast host who has spent four decades at the center of American conservative commentary. A former speechwriter for Nancy Reagan and one of the original Never Trump voices, she writes with unflinching honesty about the GOP's drift toward extremism. Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of The Mona Charen Show on The Bulwark, she is one of the few conservative commentators who has maintained intellectual consistency through decades of partisan turbulence.
Jordan Schneider
Jordan Schneider is the founder and editor-in-chief of ChinaTalk, the premier independent newsletter and podcast covering US-China tech and policy. A Yale-educated historian who earned a master's in economics from Peking University's Yenching Academy, Schneider has built ChinaTalk into a 65,000-subscriber powerhouse with over 1 million podcast downloads in 2025 alone. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a former 2023-24 AWM Scholar, with bylines in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wired, and Lawfare. Based in New York and fluent in Chinese, Schneider synthesizes elite policy analysis with accessible storytelling, covering semiconductors, AI development, export controls, and the full sweep of US-China competition.
Caitlin Doornbos
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.