Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Articles and Interviews from Dr. Isaiah Wilson

Posted on Wednesday April 8 2026

When President Donald Trump told Axios that the war with Iran could end “any time I want it to end” because there is “practically nothing left to target,” he may have offered the most revealing statement yet about the American approach to war. “The war is going great,” Trump said. “We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible.” Measured in purely operational terms, the president may well be correct…

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“Social Science of War: Learning from Iraq,” Interview with Dr. Isaiah Wilson III conducted by Gabe Royal, Modern War Institute at West Point, May 21, 2024. 

Episode 6, Season 2 of the Social Science of War is the second in a two-part series looking back at lessons learned from the United States’ war in Iraq. Major Gabe Royal is joined by Dr. Isaiah “Ike” Wilson III, a veteran and scholar of the conflict. After twenty-eight years as An Army officer, he served as the director of the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College and subsequently as the president of the Joint Special Operations University. He is the author of the book Thinking Beyond War.

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“Social Science of War: Iraq in Retrospect, Twenty Years Later,” Interview with Dr. Isaiah  Wilson III conducted by Gabe Royal, Modern War Institute at West Point, May 7, 2024. 

Episode 5, Season 2 of the Social Science of War is the first in a two-part series looking back at lessons learned from the United States’ war in Iraq. Major Gabe Royal is joined by Dr. Isaiah “Ike” Wilson III, a veteran and scholar of the conflict. Part one of this conversation centers on Dr. Wilson’s book, Thinking Beyond War, and an op-ed he authored at the ten-year anniversary of the 101st Airborne Division’s invasion of Iraq, titled “Beyond COIN. ”

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“What the U.S. Military Still Hasn’t Learned From Iraq”: It’s Hard to Win Without a Plan for the Future,” by Isaiah Wilson III, Foreign Affairs, July 4, 2023.

By the summer of 2003, it had become clear to even its most ardent proponents that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had, at the very least, not gone as planned. After Washington disbanded the Iraqi military at the end of May, hundreds of thousands of armed men began protesting across the country. Fighters began regularly attacking U.S. and allied soldiers, prompting the American military to spend June carrying out a series of operations to find and kill armed groups…

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