Barry Posen

Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the executive committee of MIT Seminar XXI. He has written three books, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy; Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks; and The Sources of Military Doctrine. The latter won two awards: the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November-December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; guest scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow; Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College; Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center; 2017 recipient of the International Securities Studies Section (ISSS) Distinguished Scholar Award; and most recently, a receipient of Notre Dame International Security Center's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Barry Posen's principal research interest is US grand strategy and national security policy. He also focuses on US military strategy, force structure and capabilities, and force posture (the global distribution of US military forces.) First, what is the grand strategy today, how did we get here, and how well is it working? Second, what major trends in the world might speak to the need for change? Specific trends under examination are changes in the global distribution of material power; the political mobilization of large numbers of young people, especially as it relates to identity politics; and the diffusion of military technology and techniques that permit the weak to better tilt with the strong. Third, what might a changed US grand strategy and its associated military strategy and force structure, which would be more responsive to emerging trends, look like?