Professor Michael Epkenhans describes how Otto von Bismarck's adroit use of war, realpolitik and the harnessing all levers of state power unified the German nation.

Otto von Bismarck, Prussian Chancellor and – after 1871 – the leading political figure of the Second German Empire after the Kaiser, hated to be bullied but managed to manipulate and bully all around him into following his complex strategic plan. This involved not only keeping German democrats at bay but also Denmark, Austria, and France. Tricking Denmark and France into breaking conventions and declaring war on Prussia and its allies respectively, he got the other German states to close ranks and back the Prussian claim for leadership in a newly united German State.

By putting Prussia on the defensive, the other European great powers – the United Kingdom and Russia – did not intervene, even though the emergent German superstate changed the balance of powers in Europe. Stopping short of aiming for overseas territories, taking on the role of the honest broker of the quarrels among others, Bismarck avoided pushing Britain and Russia over the brink into coalescing against Germany – which his immoderate successors did not.

We are joined by Michael Epkenhans, Beatrice Heuser's successor as Director of Research at the Bundeswehr's Military History Research Office, and specialist on 19th century German and Prussian history.

Innovation has long been a Western strategy, but how can it be made effective against an industrially and economically strong China? Dame Fiona Murray explains.

A defining feature of the West's Cold War approach to the Soviet Union was leveraging its technological and economic advantages, including through 'offset strategies'. While defence innovation remains a pillar of Western security, its focus has shifted toward dual-use technologies, reflecting a broader move of the locus of innovation from states to private industry.

However, just as earlier episodes in Season 5 explored (Episodes 10 and 11 regarding US industrial mobilisation during the Second World War, and Jean Monnet's plans for European post-war cooperation), success requires many actors coming together to create a resilient ecosystem. Achieving this demands alignment by all parties.

Professor Dame Fiona Murray is the Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund and William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She advises the UK Government and sits on the European Innovation Council Joint Expert Group. Her work is published widely in Science, Nature, American Journal of Sociology, Organisation Science and the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation. Her most recent book Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement, (MIT Press, 2025) is with Phil Budden.

Further Reading

Phil Budden and Fiona Murray, Accelerating Innovation: Competitive Advantage through Ecosystem Engagement, MIT Press, 2025.

Edlyn V. Levine and Fiona Murray, How the US and its allies can rebuild economic security, in MIT Technology Review, 30 July 2024.

Stefan Raff, Fiona E. Murray, and Martin Murmann, Why You Should Tap Innovation at Deep-Tech Startups, in MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2024.

Gene Keselman and Fiona Murray, Dual-use is a Strategy, Not a Category (Nor a Trap), War on the Rocks, 2 January 2025.

The National Army Museum's Justin Maciejewski reveals how General Bagnall's far-reaching reforms transformed the British Army for war against the USSR.

By the 1980s, General (later Field Marshal) Sir Nigel Bagnall GCB CVO MC and bar (1927-2002) felt that British Army was ill-prepared for the fight against the Soviets. He pinpointed shortcomings such as the lack of conventional mass, the right doctrine and a personnel skills gap. Moreover, British plans did not fit with the allied armies on either flank.

Bagnall sought to transform the Army and integrate it within a broader NATO approach involving changing nuclear and conventional postures, most notably the Air-Land Battle.

Commissioned as an infantry officer, Bagnall was schooled in counter-insurgency warfare in Palestine, Malaya, Cyprus and Indonesia-Malaysia before becoming an armour commander in West Germany. As Chief of the General Staff, he steered many of the reforms he had initiated when commanding the British Army of the Rhine, changing the face of the Army and leaving it better prepared for war in Europe. According to Justin Maciejewski, the reforms made Bagnall the most consequential officer since the Second World War.

Justin Maciejewski DSO MBE spent 27 years in the British Army before becoming a management consultant for McKinsey and then moving to the National Army Museum in London. He draws on his experience serving in the Army through the Bagnall reforms, and his time as a consultant overseeing commercial transformation programmes.

Further Reading

Justin Maciejewski, How the British Army's Operations Went Agile, McKinsey Quarterly, October 2019.

Alexander Alderson, Influence, the Indirect Approach and Manoeuvre, RUSI Journal Vol.157:1, 2012, pp. 36-43.

Ben Barry, Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025, Osprey, 2025.

Army, Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 01, Operations, 1994.

Beatrice Heuser: NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949-2000 (London: Macmillan, 1997)

Admiral Nelson instilled in his sailors a martial spirit that in many battles saw them prevail against superior odds. Dr Martin Robson discusses Nelson's legacy with us.

Widely considered one of the greatest admirals, alongside Admiral Yi Sun-sin, (Season 4, Episode 6) - Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson (1758-1805) advised: 'No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy'. His legacy is multi-faceted, but in this episode, we seek to explore his leadership style, which might today be seen as pre-empting mission command, and his ability to create a warrior culture that delivered victory. Dr Martin Robson helps us explore how Nelson instilled this culture and what lessons in leadership remain for us today.

Dr Robson is an associate professor at the University of Exeter Strategy and Security Institute, specialising in the use of history and strategic theory of the past for today. He is also a member of the Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy. He holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and has experience working at the United Kingdom Defence Academy. He is the author of two volumes in the prestigious A History of the Royal Navy series, covering the Napoleonic Wars (2014) and the Seven Years War (2015), published by IB Taurus.

Further Reading

Martin Robson, A History of the Royal Navy: Napoleonic Wars, IB Taurus, 2014.

Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Power, Little Brown, 1899. Available at: https://archive.org/details/lifeofnelsonembo01maha

John Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797, Random House, 2005.

Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, John Murray, 1996.

A former four-star combatant commander, General (retd) Lori Robinson, discusses the challenges of strategy making and strategic leadership in a complex environment.

After 37 years of military service, Gen. Robinson retired in 2018 as commander of the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). This double role required her to report to both the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada. Consequently, her tenure involved directly addressing strategic challenges to the US posed by both China and Russia. She was the first woman in US history to lead a combatant command.

Having operated in environments of political and interagency complexity, she discusses the lessons she learned about being a successful strategic leader, working with politicians, government departments, business leaders and allied militaries.

Having retired in 2018, General Robinson is now a non-resident Senior Fellow in the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and is a director on the KornFerry Board. She was named as one of Time magazine's '100 Most Influential People'; in 2016 and one of its 'First Women Leaders' in 2017.

Edward Luce discusses how Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Carter, sought to bring down the USSR and end the Cold War by magnifying the Politburo' dilemmas.

During the Cold War, two dominant émigré figures emerged in United States national security strategy making: Henry Kissinger (Republican) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Democrat). Zbigniew Brzezinski played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign, later serving as Carter's National Security Advisor. Often described as the realist 'Yin' to Carter's idealistic 'Yang,' Brzezinski was a trusted confidant of the President. However, his often-hawkish foreign policy stance created tensions within the Democratic Party and led to challenging relationships with colleagues in the State Department and Department of Defence. His efforts to bring down the Soviet Union earned the admiration of Ronald Reagan, whose Republican administration continued many of Brzezinski's policies. The consequences of some of these policies, though, caused problems later.

Edward Luce is the North America Editor of the Financial Times. He published a recent biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski that sought to reclaim Brzezinski's reputation as a leading architect of the strategy that brought the Cold War to an end without it becoming hot.

Further Reading

Edward Luce, Zbig. The life of Zbig Brzezinski: America's great power prophet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025).

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Strategic Vision; American and the Crisis of Global Power, Basic Books, 2012, available at: https://archive.org/details/strategicvisiona0000brze

Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, 1997, available at: https://archive.org/details/grandchessboarda00brze_0/mode/2up

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century, Collier Books, 1993, available at: https://archive.org/details/outofcontrolglob00brze/mode/2up

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).

Justin Vaïsse, Zbigniew Brzezinski: America's Grand Strategist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Can clear Ends exist in a radically uncertain world? Lord Mervyn King explains how to align Ways and Means without them.

Successive national security and defence reviews in recent years have adjusted their language about the nature of the world, moving from being one of competition, to uncertainty, to today's 'radical uncertainty'. Is the concept simply being used to justify the new review and differentiate it from the last one, or does it reflect a real change in the challenges nations confront? Have we moved beyond VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), to BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible) and does it matter? And what does it mean for our approach to making strategy?

To guide us through these questions, we are joined by Baron Mervyn King of Lothbury KG. An economist by training, he graduated from both Cambridge and Harvard Universities, after time as an academic he became the Bank of England's chief economist. Between 2003-1013, he served as its Governor, where he was responsible for the United Kingdom's economic strategy during the 2008 global financial crisis. An accomplished academic, thinker and author, his book Radical Uncertainty with Professor John Kay considers the implications for decision making of this radical uncertainty.

Further Reading

John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an Unknowable Future, Bridge Street Press, 2020.

Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler, The Decision Book: Fifty models for strategic thinking, Profile Books, 2023.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, Penguin, 2007.

Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Random House, 2006.

Dr Fiona Hill, one of the lead reviewers on the UK's 2025 Strategic Defence Review, discusses an expansive approach to defence and security for the modern world.

Dr Hill, who served the first Trump administration as a Russia expert, brings deep insights into Russian, American and British defence policy making.

Having identified Russia's obsession with recovering the old Tsarist Empire's borderlands, and anticipated Putin's strategic use of economic power to create dependencies in the 1990s, she sheds light on the thinking of Presidents Putin and Trump, and what is now needed by societies used to a peace dividend.

She also explains the challenges faced by the drafters of the UK's Strategic Defence Review, with limited means available to respond to a transformed international environment, with Russia an enemy, and the USA now an economic rival and a less reliable ally.

Dr Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and Chancellor of Durham University in the UK. She is on Harvard University's Board of Overseers, from where she gained her doctorate in history and was a Frank Knox Fellow. She co-authored Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (2003), both with Clifford Gaddy. She has been appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George by the UK and Knight First Class of Finland's Order of the Lion.

Often touted as the gold standard in national security strategy making, 1953's Project Solarium was President Eisenhower's way of developing a strategy to counter Soviet expansionism. With frequent current calls for a new Project Solarium, was the original project a versatile solution or was it particular to Eisenhower's presidency? Professor Walter Hudson explains.

By 1947 relations with the Soviet Union were viewed in Washington as an ideological tug-of-war that could only be won by one side. After the initial strategy of Containment had been crafted under President Truman, the US and its NATO allies massively increased defence spending once the Korean War broke out, fearing a series of further acts of Communist aggression. By mid-1953, however, Stalin was dead, the Korean War at its end, while the cost to the US of the Containment strategy adopted in 1950 was becoming unbearable. With Project Solarium President Eisenhower initiated a rethink not only of what American strategy should be, but also how that strategy was made and understood by his Administration.

Professor Walter M. Hudson from the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., guides us through the process adopted in 1953. A former US Army officer, he served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Panama, Korea and Germany, and holds a PhD in military history from Kansas State University. He is the author of Solarium at 70: Project Solarium's Influence on Eisenhower Historiography and National Security Strategy, published in 2023 by the National Defense University.

Beatrice and Paul reflect on the lessons for strategy-making and strategy-delivery from their conversations with and about strategic leaders in earlier episodes. Previous sessions of Talking Strategy have explored the activities of great strategic leaders and commanders from around the world. In this final episode of the current season, Paul and Beatrice reflect on past conversations and try to identify what lessons might be drawn about strategic leadership and how that shapes the way strategy is made and delivered. While the concept of strategic leadership itself is contested, this episode draws out some consistent themes from earlier episodes. Based around the concept of strategic leadership as a fundamentally human endeavour, Beatrice and Paul explore how strategy is developed by understanding and shaping the external environment, by mobilising the resources available within the enterprise the leader controls, and by ensuring the internal culture encourages commitment from all.

Strategic leaders play an important role in making sense of the world around them, setting the direction for their organisation and mobilising it in delivering the strategy. But delivery depends on sometimes thousands of others investing their talents in ensuring the strategy's success. So, while individual strategic leaders, in all their diversity, often appear as heroes, they represent thousands of others too. Join Beatrice and Paul as they try to distil lessons from the greats covered by this podcast series and what we might take away to help liberate the talent of our own organisations to succeed.