Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where her research areas include national security strategy, NATO, and alliances and U.S.-led international order. She returns to the Chautauqua Lecture Series for a week on “What We Got Wrong: Learning from Our Mistakes” to examine the contemporary legacy of American warfare — from Vietnam through Afghanistan to the current day — asking what mistakes we’ve learned from and those we’ve not, and how this can inform American military strategy as we engage in a new era of diplomacy and defense.

Before joining AEI, Schake was the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. She has had a distinguished career in government, working at the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the White House. She has also taught at King’s College, Stanford, West Point, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, National Defense University, and the University of Maryland, and served as senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008.

Schake is the author of five books, including America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved?; Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony; State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department; and Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance. She is also the coeditor, along with former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, of Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military.

Schake holds a PhD and MA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, as well as an MPM from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. She received her bachelor’s degree in international relations from Stanford University.