Mike Gallagher, a Senior Research Fellow at the Blue Center for Global Strategic Assessment, will deliver a booktalk on his forthcoming book about the end of the Korean War.

The first war of the atomic age was conventional: more artillery shells were fired in Korea than in all of World War II. More napalm was dropped in Korea than in Vietnam and on more densely populated cities. Korea yielded a higher per capita civilian casualty rate than either World War II or the Vietnam War. It was America's first "forever war," a stalemate that produced regime change not in the Land of Morning Calm but in the United States, bringing the first Republican president and Congress in 20 years. 

Within seven months of his election, Dwight Eisenhower achieved an armistice in Korea and fundamentally re-engineered America's grand strategy for defending the Free World from communism. And yet this extraordinary feat of statesmanship from one of America's most celebrated military leaders is nearly forgotten in our time. 

Worse, this historical amnesia comes at a time when America's primary adversary in Korea -- the Chinese Communist Party -- resurrects false narratives and arms itself to challenge the West anew in the 21st century. What lessons should America take from the Korean War? How should Washington confront Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific now?

Mike Gallagher is Head of Defense for Palantir Technologies and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. He represented Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District (2017-24) and was chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and a member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From 2019 to 2021, he served as Co-Chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Mike earned a PhD in international relations from Georgetown University, a master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown, a master’s degree in government from Georgetown, and a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University with a focus on Near Eastern studies and Arabic.