You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the editor-in-chief of Warner Rocks and I'm sitting here with Hal Brands and Frank Gavin.

Why don't you tell us who you are?

I'm Hal Brands. I work here at the Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins-Sice and I'm a senior fellow at CSBA.

I'm Frank Avon.

I direct the Kissinger Center.

I'm also Hal Brand's sponsor.

So we're here to discuss Hal's new book, American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump,

which is a collection of essays that he put together. I was supposed to be joined

by my colleague, our managing editor Usha Suai, and she was reading your book and then she got terribly,

terribly sick and couldn't make it anymore.

So I'm not sure if it was your book.

It tends to have that effect on people.

To her or if it was, or if it was something else, but Usha please get better.

So what made you write this book?

I mean, this is really a collection of your reactions to the ascent of Trump and

what he represented in foreign policy, yes?

Yeah, so the, I guess the story of this book goes back a couple of years when I started thinking

about some of the big overarching questions in American Grand Strategy today and thinking about it mainly through the lens of,

you know, what had America's Grand Strategy been since the end of the Cold War, what were the

major alternatives of that strategy and how effective would they be.

Doing that because I thought we were gearing up

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