Experience Planner

Robert Doar and Cecilia Elena Rouse, presidents of two of the nation’s most highly regarded public policy think tanks, come together in conversation on the Amphitheater stage to lead off a week of dialogue on “The Future of the American Experiment,” presented at Chautauqua in partnership with AEI and Brookings. In providing their perspectives on the state of our democratic republic today — plus thoughts on its immediate and long-term future, and how Americans can find common ground on our most urgent challenges — the pair will set the stage for the week’s remaining Chautauqua Lecture Series programs, all featuring experts from both organizations.

Robert Doar became American Enterprise Institute’s 12th president in July 2019. Since then, he has recruited dozens of leading scholars and fellows across multiple issue areas and launched a new research division focused on Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies. By supporting the extensive work of AEI scholars in areas including foreign and defense policy, education, the reform of key institutions, the U.S. economy, and in opportunity and mobility studies, Doar has helped to solidify AEI’s position as a leading voice on the major issues facing the United States.

While at AEI, Doar has served as a co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger and as a lead member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity. Doar joined AEI in 2014 to lead the Institute’s opportunity and mobility studies program after serving for more than 20 years in leadership positions in the social service programs of New York state and New York City.

Cecilia Elena Rouse is the president of the Brookings Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the first Black American to fill that role in the CEA’s 75-year history. Confirmed with 95 votes in the U.S. Senate, she served as CEA chair while on public service leave from Princeton University, where she joined the faculty in 1992. The university’s Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education and a professor of economics and public affairs, she served as dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs from 2012 to 2021.

A labor economist with a focus on the economics of education, Rouse is the founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the National Academy of Sciences. A member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011, she was Special Assistant to the President at the National Economic Council from 1998 to 1999.

This program is made possible by Week Four Presenting Sponsor Erie Insurance. This program is also supported by The Charles Ellsworth Goodell Lectureship in Government and Public Affairs.

Michael O’Hanlon and Kori Schake are two of the nation’s leading experts in American defense strategy and foreign policy. The pair will present in tandem, building on the Chautauqua Lecture Series theme of “The Future of the American Experiment,” with an examination of world affairs and the global order through the lenses of U.S. defense and diplomacy. The program is the second in a five-part weeklong series presented at Chautauqua in partnership with the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution, each featuring experts from both organizations.

Michael O’Hanlon is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy and budgets, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He is a senior fellow and directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy, and Technology, and serves as co-director of the Africa Security Initiative. An adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Columbia University and a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, he was also a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011 to 2012.

O’Hanlon’s most recent book is Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861; other works include The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint, Defense 101: Understanding the Military of Today and Tomorrow, and The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War over Limited Stakes.

O’Hanlon was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1994, where he won the Director’s Award in 1992. His doctorate from Princeton University is in public and international affairs, where he was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship. His bachelor’s and master’s degrees, also from Princeton, are in the physical sciences. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1982 to 1984, where he taught college and high school physics in French.

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; alliances and U.S.-led international order; and threats to the liberal international order.

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 Ph.D. and M.A. 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.

This program is made possible by Week Four Presenting Sponsor Erie Insurance. This program is also supported by The Travis E. and Betty J. Halford Lectureship Endowment and The Foglesong Family Lectureship Fund.