Join the World Affairs Council of Charlotte for an exclusive private dinner on Tuesday, September 22 with Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Director of Research for the Foreign Policy Program, inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, and author of “To Dare Might Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution.”

O’Hanlon is one of Washington’s most trusted thought leaders on U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and national security policy. His career spans more than three decades of advising the Pentagon, the CIA, and Congress and it has taken him from the halls of the Congressional Budget Office to front-row policy debates over NATO, China, Ukraine, and the future of American power.

Seating is limited to 24.

This evening, O’Hanlon draws on everything from the Civil War to the war in Afghanistan to examine how America conducts military operations and what 250 years of conflict reveal about a nation still defining its identity as a military superpower at the moment of its semiquincentennial.

 

 

  • WACC Private Dinner Sponsorship and Underwriting – DOWNLOAD LINK 

Program Information: 

Date: Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026
Check-In & Networking: 6:00 – 6:30 PM
Dinner & Discussion: 6:30 – 8:30 PM
Location: TBA
Cost: $180 (WACC Member Rate) | $200 (Non-Member Rate) — limited to 24 people
*Includes pre-dinner wine, salad, entrée, dessert, wine during dinner, and coffee service

 

 

 

Biography: 

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. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Columbia University and was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2021 to 2025; he was also a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. His newest book, timed to coincide with the nation’s 250th birthday, is “To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution” (Yale Press, 2026).In 2023, O’Hanlon published a book titled “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861.” The paperback version of the book, with a preface covering the American Revolution as well as the declared wars of the 19th century, came out in 2024.

O’Hanlon’s other books include “The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint” (Yale, 2021); “Defense 101: Understanding the Military of Today and Tomorrow” (Cornell, 2021); “The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War over Limited Stakes (Brookings, 2019); “Beyond NATO: A New Security Architecture for Eastern Europe” (Brookings, 2017); “The Future of Land Warfare” (Brookings, 2015); “Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century” (with Jim Steinberg, Princeton University Press, 2014); “Crisis on the Korean Peninsula” (with Mike Mochizuki, McGraw-Hill, 2003); “Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo” (with Ivo Daalder, Brookings, 2000); and several other books. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Survival, Washington Quarterly, Joint Forces Quarterly, and International Security, among other publications; he has also written hundreds of op-eds in major newspapers. Recent articles include a detailed analysis of the U.S. defense budget, a military assessment of a possible Chinese blockade of Taiwan, and a proposal with Georgetown Professor Lise Howard for a new security architecture for eastern Europe. O’Hanlon has appeared on television or spoken on the radio more than 4,000 times since September 11, 2001.

O’Hanlon was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989-1994, where he won the Director’s Award in 1992. His doctorate from Princeton 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 1982-1984, where he taught college and high school physics in French. Earlier, he worked on a dairy farm in Upstate New York, where he grew up. During college, he attempted (unsuccessfully) with a team of Princeton experimental physicists in the “Gravity Group” to disprove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.