New World Order: What the War in Ukraine Means For American Grand Strategy

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along with retaliatory Western sanctions has caused a reassessment of America’s foreign policy. Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the end of the Pax Americana, or is the unified Western response a sign of resilient American strength? Are we facing a new Cold War or a multipolar conflict between civilizations? Do the United States have a grand strategy – and do we need a new one?

Join us on Thursday, May 5 at 6:30 p.m. for a discussion.

A livestream is available here.

Ross Douthat is a Media Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology. He joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed Columnist in 2009. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Simon and Schuster, 2018), Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005). He is the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008). Mr. Douthat is also the Film Critic for National Review.

Elbridge Colby is co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, a policy initiative focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press), which The Wall Street Journal selected as one of the top ten books of 2021. Previously, Colby was from 2018-2019 the Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, where he led the Center’s work on defense issues.

Jakub Grygiel is a professor at the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). In 2017-2018 he was a senior advisor in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and on the faculty of SAIS-Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Return of the Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (JHU Press, 2006), and co-author with Wess Mitchell of The Unquiet Frontier (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based think tank Hudson Institute and the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative. She specializes in US defense policy with a focus on strategic deterrence.
She is also a contributing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy and an adjunct professor of nuclear policy at the Institute of World Politics.