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.
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.