Nadia Schadlow has spent her career thinking about a question that many institutions prefer to avoid: not simply what a strategy says, but whether a government can actually carry it out. Across work in the Defense Department, the policy world, and the White House, she has focused on the space between ideas and implementation, where plans meet bureaucracy, politics, incentives, and time.
In this conversation, Schadlow reflects on the gap between strategy and execution, the gray zone between peace and war, the overlap between economic security and national security, and the challenges of competing with China. She also offers a candid account of helping shape the 2017 National Security Strategy, explaining why national security cannot be separated entirely from politics and why the hardest work often begins after the white paper is written.
For students interested in foreign policy and national security, Schadlow’s advice is practical: read history, clarify your assumptions, learn both regions and functions, build coalitions, and do not mistake fluent commentary for strategic judgment. Strategy, in her telling, is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a discipline of choosing, sequencing, persuading, and following through.
Strategy as Direction and Implementation
Ben Wolf: You’ve moved between academia, the military policy world, and the White House. When you look back, was there a moment earlier in your career when you realized that strategy, rather than just diplomacy or operations, was the lever you most wanted to pull?
Nadia Schadlow: I don’t think you ever anticipate exactly where your education and experiences are going to lead you. A lot of it is serendipity and being prepared for the moments that are presented to you.
I always knew I was interested in strategy. I like thinking about the components of strategy, but what I really like is thinking about how you operationalize strategy. It is the combination of articulating a direction you want to go, or the direction you think a country should take, and then the operational ways to get there. I’ve always been interested in that combination.
The Gray Zone and the Operational Gap
BW: Many people study war, but far fewer study what happens in the ambiguous space before it. What drew you specifically to the gray zone between peace and war as the central problem of modern strategy?
NS: I began to see a pattern of overreliance on the Defense Department as the agency that could get things done quickly. When you work in government, even though I worked at the Defense Department, I could see that my counterparts in other agencies, especially the State Department, and even at the White House more generally, consistently relied on the Defense Department because it had operational capabilities that most other parts of our government do not have.
Not all, obviously. The Department of Homeland Security has components that do, and the intelligence agencies do. But the civilian agencies, such as the Commerce Department, for a long time the Treasury Department, and the State Department, do not think as much in operational terms.
That began to interest me because it was clear that if we were going to operate as a country in these areas short of war, whether we call them operations short of war, gray-zone areas, or non-kinetic competition, we needed a more competitive mindset more consistently. We also needed the capabilities to do things about problems in those domains.
Part of the reason I mentioned the Treasury Department as an agency that changed is because there was a really interesting shift after 9/11. After the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, there was a sense that we needed to improve our financial tools, both to cut off terrorist sources of funding and, later, to sanction countries like Iran that were developing nuclear programs. The need to develop this financial toolkit emerged, and I think it is a very good example for your readers of how the government, when it decides to refine a set of operational capabilities and equip itself to use them, can do that.
There are two specific books you could link to if your readers are interested. One is Juan Zarate’s Treasury’s War, which uses the phrase “guerrillas in gray suits.” The other is Edward Fishman’s more recent book, Chokepoints. The chapter on Iran really describes how Treasury developed those tools.
Strategy Versus Implementation
BW: When you look at Washington today, where is the gap biggest between the way we talk about strategy and the way we actually behave and implement that strategy?
NS: Unfortunately, it is everywhere.
Another little test case is that your readers could take a number of pronouncements. Just this morning, I was looking at some Defense Production Act awards that have been given over the years. These are grants that the Department of Defense gave to companies and entities to do things. They might be $2 million, $10 million, or $20 million, and it is very hard to find what happened afterward.
That does not mean there are nefarious things going on. But it does mean that follow-up on actual implementation is a serious problem, both in terms of transparency and in understanding how funds are being spent. Equally important, are we getting the outcomes we want?
When we say we are providing a big chunk of money for an infrastructure project, whether domestically or abroad, the follow-up and the ability to figure out whether that outcome has been achieved is, in my view, unnecessarily difficult. There just is not a reason for it.
I see it across the board, including in the State Department. This is absolutely not just this administration. It is a bipartisan problem that has existed for decades.
Competition with China
BW: If you strip away the speeches and white papers, do you think the United States has actually accepted what serious competition with China requires economically, industrially, and politically? Or are we still trying to preserve the comforts of the pre-competition era?
NS: I think we are still debating what it means. I think we are close, but I do not think we have definitively decided as a country the direction we want to take.
There is a push and pull. There is a growing recognition that the overlap between economic security and national security is growing and growing. I am not an economist, but it is harder and harder to argue that you can make decisions only on the basis of economic efficiency.
For your readers who are economists, I think there is interesting work to be done there. How do economists think about that link? That is the way I approach it as a national security person, but what are economists really thinking? How has economics shifted to accept that, or not? I think that is an interesting area.
Second, in terms of the competition with China, we have not really figured out whether we are going to take an approach that emphasizes what we need to do internally as a country, meaning improve, build, reindustrialize here, ensure we have enough workers here, and build up what we need here, or whether we need to do things almost offensively to weaken or slow China.
Those are two different ways of thinking about competition. You have a lot of people who argue that export controls are needed to make sure China does not have the chips it wants right now. That is part of the Nvidia debate. Those are examples of a “slow China down” approach, versus an approach that emphasizes that we need to do our own things no matter what and focus more on that.
It is not an either/or, but I think it is a useful way of framing the different tools. There is a lot of information out there, and what I try to do is think thematically about these different baskets of issues.
What Endures Across Administrations
BW: You helped shape the 2017 National Security Strategy. When different administrations change, there are different cabinet members and different people leading national security. How much of the work you did then is preserved today? How much does it change? Is that ever frustrating, that there is not a consistent presence of one’s strategy?
NS: I think a lot of people in the national security community, for many years, argued that national security was apart from politics. There was a view that there is something enduring about it, and somehow it is all apolitical.
I never really believed that entirely. I think there are enduring assumptions about the way the world works and about the way you think the world works. But in a democracy, a national security strategy needs to be linked to elected political leaders, to a body politic, and to explaining things to the American people. It is political.
It is up to people like me and others to make arguments about why these threats and opportunities should transcend politics, or why, if we keep going back and forth, we are not going to get to a better place as a country. But you always have to be able to make those arguments and convince the next generation of political leaders.
I do think a lot of features of the 2017 strategy are enduring. I can point to many of them, and many of them are not based only on President Trump, although the 2017 strategy was his first administration’s strategy. The Biden administration subsequently did many of the same things, or articulated competition with China and the importance of doing more manufacturing in the country.
It was not all the same. The Biden administration articulated climate as an existential threat. The 2017 strategy did not do that. The current Trump strategy in 2025 does not do that. So of course there are differences. But I think there are a lot of features of the 2017 strategy that remain relevant almost ten years later.
Inside the Making of the 2017 National Security Strategy
BW: Could you give us an inside look into how shaping that strategy actually worked? How long does it take? Where does it first begin? How does the research get involved? How does the nitpicking of writing it and proposing it to people work?
NS: There is no set template for writing a national security strategy. It is not something that is handed down from one president to another. Congress basically said, I think in 1986, although you should check when it first became part of law, that each administration should produce a national security strategy.
Since then, every administration has produced one, although they have not produced one every year, which I think is fine. I do not think you want a strategy produced every year. That would seem odd. What you would want is a sense of how things are going and implementation updates. But there is no formula for doing that.
In contrast, in the military, or in the Army, there is doctrine. There are set ways of writing things. That is not the same here. I like to say that it is an art, not a science.
I read all the previous national security strategies, in addition to documents that predated the requirement. President Nixon, in the 1970s, would give these very good messages to Congress on his foreign and national security policy. They were very well written and coherent, so I would suggest that the historians in your audience go back and read some of those.
I read all of that and began to get a sense of what the organization should look like. We decided, as a small team, to develop ours based on four core national interests of the United States: protect the American homeland, advance American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, and advance American influence.
I think those are four core national interests. It would be hard to find American presidents, or even political leaders today, who would say they are not. But what you will find differences in is how you do those things.
Obviously, President Biden felt pretty differently than President Trump about protecting the homeland. President Trump would argue that you have to lock down borders to do that. President Biden did not think that. President Trump is providing more emphasis on Golden Dome and missile defense. President Biden had a different view. But the overall interest is still protecting the homeland. The politics come in when you start arguing about how to do it and how to fund it.
After developing those four pillars, we started to gather the information needed to articulate the different approaches to what we would do. But again, this was a president’s document, so it was driven by President Trump’s view of the world, his previous speeches, his ongoing speeches, and his articulation of themes. I think the same is done for any administration.
It was not my document. It was a White House document.
We got it done in a year, but that is because I am pretty insistent on making sure that meetings do not go on forever and processes do not go on forever. That is the big death of outcomes: sclerosis. I hope all your readers keep that in mind.
You have to take decisions. You have to put a limit on time. You cannot spend your whole time in meetings. That is process, not outcome. Every meeting should have a purpose. Even at the university level, the purpose of the meeting should be stated at the beginning. That is the way you need to begin, whether in business, academia, or government, though it does not happen often enough in government.
Supply Chains, Critical Minerals, and the Crisis of Repetition
BW: You have written and spoken about very relevant issues like supply chains, industrial resilience, and the innovation base. What do you think national security officials now understand better than they did a decade ago? And what are they still reluctant to confront today?
NS: I think they understand better at a national level the seriousness of our vulnerabilities. Having said that, unfortunately, these problems are not new.
I wrote a piece called “The Crisis of Repetition,” which you can probably link to, that argued that our concern about critical minerals is about forty years old. Since 1980, you can document it. I started to ask: Why are we just repeating this and not doing anything about it?
I did not find a really satisfying answer, except that it is very hard. Political leaders also like to start from scratch themselves because it is easier to have the idea, as opposed to saying, “My predecessor actually also identified this as a problem. How can I help solve it?” I think that is partly human nature. You want to think you are starting fresh all the time. There is a little bit of human ego there, as opposed to recognizing that there are a lot of smart people out there and a lot of people have tried to tackle this problem.
That is another thing I would encourage younger people to do. Begin with that assumption going in, and then ask what obstacles still exist to solving the problem. That is harder. It is also less interesting. It is less exciting. You have to go into the obstacles. You have to go into the regulations. You have to figure out what you want to hack away at. That is harder than saying, “I want to build this shiny new thing,” or “I want to say that I am going to build this shiny thing.” That is just more fun.
The other stuff is hard, but I think technology and data today make it harder to avoid. We know the thousands of regulations that slow things down. We know the years of data that exist on how long projects take. So I think it is harder to ignore, and maybe it will get better.
But I think what we are still discovering is that we still have competing ways of doing things. For instance, in the industrial base, do you throw all your chips into three sectors of the economy? Or do you sprinkle things around?
I think we are seeing now an effort to throw chips into key sectors. I happen to think that is the right approach. Critical minerals, certain types of batteries, different components. That is different from sprinkling things around and letting a thousand flowers bloom. I am not sure that is the right approach.
Having said that, what are the competing approaches to these efforts at industrial policy? That is another idea for your readers, who are all still writing papers and being forced to write papers for classes. I do not think we have settled on these different approaches.
Regional Expertise, Functional Expertise, and the Need for Frameworks
BW: When you look back at your career, what do you think the biggest trade-off has been in terms of the work you have done, and what do you wish you had known before entering the field?
NS: I think it is the balance between functional areas and regional expertise. People in this field ideally need to achieve both.
For me, one thing was never becoming fluent enough in languages. Fluency with languages is great. I studied Russian, but I never got to the level where I was reading fully because I did not spend a lot of time there. Knowing a region well matters, and language tends to be important.
It is not a game. Some people are terrible at languages, and that does not mean you cannot do this work. But spending time in the countries you are studying is helpful. Having said that, it is harder to spend time in certain countries today, given the environment. But I think it really does help.
I also think you need to figure out what functional areas are important to you. If you are going to do trade, you need to know trade policy well. If you are going to do nuclear weapons, you need to know nuclear weapons well. If you are going to do missile defense, you do not have to be a scientist or engineer, but as a policy person you need to know the nitty-gritty. You have to try to maintain a balance between both.
Then there is the perpetual question of at what level you also have to be a generalist. There is no perfect answer to all of that. Everyone’s time is limited.
But I would encourage people to think thematically about what the debates really mean. You cannot just throw data at things. When you are supporting more senior people, whether as an intern or as a junior person starting out, do not just throw data at the person you report to. It does not mean anything without a framework. It is harder to get to that framework, but that is the work.
Moving a Bureaucracy
BW: What did you learn about the difference between writing strategy on paper and trying to move an actual bureaucracy? Was there ever an instance where you felt strongly about a certain policy, but someone above you did not?
NS: It is a combination of the big stick and persuasion. But you do not really have a big stick unless you are the president, the secretary of defense, or someone like that.
It is a mistake for more junior people to think they can go around yelling, screaming, and beating up people, saying, “Do this, do this.” It does not work because a bureaucracy can generally ride you out.
You have to think deliberately about the coalitions you need to build to get something done. I think this is relevant to things students are trying to do on campus: why coalitions matter, how to persuade, how to get the buy-in you need, and how to attach timelines.
For the hardest problems, you are going to need top cover. You are going to need the person who does carry the big stick to back you up if necessary. At the same time, I have found that coalition building is the better way because a lot of entities responsible for implementation can ride you out, especially in government.
In the private sector, it is different because you can fire people who are not moving more easily, and you can get rid of unnecessary organizations more easily. But even in a company, you still need the backing of leadership to drive change. Asking that of your leaders is the top cover you need. Second is coalition building. Third is the timeline, or the Gantt chart.
I wrote a piece a while ago that was critical of efforts to move toward electrification and electric vehicles because, no matter how you feel about them, you also have to create the infrastructure at the same time. You have to make Americans feel like they can charge up anywhere.
Henry Gantt was an important engineer in the early 1900s who had this chart for how you get there. You need to think that way if you care about implementation. Today, there are all these software programs that essentially took his Gantt chart idea, but the fundamental point is that you have to work backward. It forces you to work backward from what you need to do.
Often, there will be a lot of simultaneity. It is not all sequential. You are going to have to do things simultaneously. We do not have the luxury of time in a lot of these areas.
Building Strategic Judgment
BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation back to students. For younger people interested in foreign policy, the field can sometimes reward commentary more than judgment. What experiences or habits do you think actually develop strategic judgment, as opposed to just producing fluent analysis?
NS: What do you mean by judgment? Do you mean assumptions about how the world works and whether you are going to be right about something?
BW: Yes, building strong strategic judgment so that when you enter the field, you are prepared.
NS: I would say read history. Read about a particular region or functional area. History is important because it gives you a sense of how things have worked.
Also, clarify your assumptions going in. How do you think the world works? Do not mistake process for what drives actual progress or motivations. Culture, politics, motivations, and your sense of why you think something is going to move in a particular direction all matter. Avoid wishful thinking.
In that sense, I am probably more of a realist. I think power matters in the international system. Do not think everything stays in its lane. Just because you have negotiations and diplomacy does not mean that force is not relevant. It does not mean you do use force, but it also does not mean you do not. People tend to stay in their stovepipe lanes. You have to think across lanes.
Go in articulating and assessing your assumptions, and then reassess them. They are not static. They may change over time because you get new information.
Understand the coalitions that are required or that are likely to play into a particular policy. Think about politics, because politics influences and matters, even when we wish it did not. In most countries it does, even in authoritarian countries. Politics is about people and how they interact. It is harder to assess, but it would be wrong to judge that it does not matter.
Read on your subject. Think thematically about what has happened in the past, what forces are shaping something now, and whether those forces are likely to shape something differently in the future.
Reading for Strategy
BW: Finally, as is customary with The Pathway Blog, although you have already recommended many great books, if there were a student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what literature would you recommend?
NS: That is harder because there is so much out there. I break it up into categories.
There are classic books about world order, such as Henry Kissinger’s World Order, but there are other books too. So one category would be classic books about world order and power.
Another would be classic books about how militaries work. Williamson Murray and Allan Millett wrote wonderful books about how the American military worked, technology, and war. Michael Howard has an essay called “The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy” in Foreign Affairs from the 1970s. That is a very nice essay that always framed things for me.
You could think about categories of warfare, such as the period of counterinsurgency. If you are interested in Russia, there is Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, and John Lewis Gaddis on the Cold War.
I am reading now the president of Finland Alexander Stubb’s book, The Triangle of Power. Right now, I am sorting through different books that look at world order in different ways. It is hard to identify one, which I know may be a cop-out, so I would break it into categories.
I am not an economist, and that is fine. I would have been a terrible economist. But I try to read books about globalization. Shannon K. O’Neil, at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an interesting book in that category. I would look in categories.