School of War

How do you fight a superpower you can’t afford to stop trading with? The Dutch faced that problem at the start of the 17th century in their war against Spain, and their answer was the Dutch West India Company, a business built to wage war. Alexander Bick, a historian who served on the National Security Council under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, joins School of War to discuss his new book, ⁠Minutes of Empire⁠. He explains how the company helped secure Dutch independence and why the Dutch kept trading with Spain while fighting it, taxing certain exports to “plow that money back into the military,” and what that reveals about America’s tangled relationship with China. All of which raises a question about Donald Trump’s foreign policy: Is America reviving an older style of empire?

“Let’s whisper it,” said historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. “The Trump blockade is working.” It can be hard to parse the state of play in the Middle East amid escalating rhetoric, but history gives us the necessary perspective to call balls and strikes in the present day. Today, the author of ⁠The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East⁠ joins School of War to discuss the forces that created the modern Middle East, why he thinks Trump’s strategy in Iran is working, and the growing rivalry between Israel and Turkey. “There is a real danger that Erdoğan will talk himself into a war with Israel,” he warns.

If America wants to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, it needs to build more warships. China currently dominates global shipbuilding—producing vessels at a scale the United States can no longer match. Alex Wong, an executive at South Korean shipbuilding giant Hanwha Group and a former Trump administration national security adviser, thinks he has the solution. Today, Wong joins Aaron MacLean to discuss how the United States lost its shipbuilding capacity, how South Korean technology and investment could help revive American shipyards, and what it will take to rebuild the country’s naval industrial base. “America doesn’t have 20 years” to regain its maritime dominance, he warns.

Could Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey form a “Muslim NATO?” Pakistan has the nuclear arsenal, Saudi Arabia has the wealth, and Turkey has the NATO-trained military—“you put these three together and it becomes a pretty formidable force,” says CBS News senior foreign correspondent Imtiaz Tyab. Today, he joins School of War to discuss whether the pact could really become an effective alliance, what the effort reveals about America’s changing role in the Middle East, and what five years of Taliban rule have meant for Afghanistan: “I’ve never seen the Taliban more confident,” he said.

John Boyd was one of the most influential military thinkers of the 20th century, and the intellectual godfather of the U.S. Marines’ military strategy. Today, as artificial intelligence continues to transform battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East, author and retired Marine officer Ian Brown argues that Boyd’s ideas are more relevant than ever. Today, Brown joins Aaron MacLean to discuss how Ukraine is harnessing Boyd’s concept of narrative warfare, what Boyd can teach us about conflict in the age of AI, drones, and precision strikes, and his new book co-authored with Frans P. B. Osinga, ⁠Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals⁠.