Kori Schake

Kori Schake serves as Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where her research focuses on the United States military, the transatlantic alliance, and American grand strategy — the intellectual domain in which the U.S.-Israel defense relationship is assessed and debated by the most serious national security thinkers. She has served on the National Security Council staff, at the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, and as Deputy Director-General of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London — a resume that spans Republican and non-partisan national security institutions.

Schake's contribution to pro-Israel advocacy is indirect but consequential: she is among the scholars who define what it means for American national security thinking to take alliance relationships seriously and to resist the politically driven pressure to condition or weaken those alliances. Her work on American alliances argues that the United States' credibility as a security guarantor depends on its reliability to its partners, and that partners who face existential threats from shared adversaries — as Israel does with Iran — deserve American support that does not fluctuate with domestic political cycles. This framework is not specific to Israel, but it produces pro-Israel conclusions when applied to the actual geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.

At AEI, alongside Danielle Pletka, Michael Rubin, and others, Schake contributes to the institution's sustained output of analysis on Iran, Hezbollah, and American defense commitments in the Middle East — analysis that provides congressional staff, executive branch policymakers, and journalists with the intellectual tools to argue for robust American commitment to Israeli security. At Rank 71, Schake represents the national security intellectual whose framework for American alliance management produces pro-Israel policy conclusions from first principles of strategic logic rather than from specifically Israel-focused advocacy.