Phillips O'Brien

Phillips O’Brien is the chair of strategic studies and head of the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on issues of conflict, politics, war, and strategy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among his books are How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, FDR’s Chief of Staff (Penguin Random House, 2015). He has also published multiple articles in major journals including Foreign Affairs, Diplomatic History, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and Past & Present. In 2024 he will publish a new multi-archival study of grand-strategy making in World War II with Penguin Random House. Professor O’Brien has been particularly active as an analyst and commentator during this most recent phase of the Russia-Ukraine war. He has worked with scholars and analysts in Ukraine, throughout the rest of Europe, and across the Atlantic to try and digest some of the lessons of the war and to understand why the prewar analysis was so fundamentally flawed. His commentary has been published regularly in The Atlantic, The Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph, and other major newspapers and journals, while he has made media appearances for outlets in more than 15 countries, including MSNBC, CNN, NPR, BBC, DW, and L’Express.