The opening days of 2026 have felt like a hinge point in history. American commandos just snatched Venezuela’s tyrant and his wife from their heavily fortified residence in Caracas. The Iranian regime teeters as more and more people flood the streets in revolt. President Donald Trump, a former reality-TV star, has changed the rules of American statecraft. To make sense of this moment, I trudged out to the suburban Maryland home of Edward Luttwak, one of the last of the grand strategists and renaissance men.
“Here, I want to show you some things,” he said as he ushered me into his library. There I found the relics from his extraordinary life: African masks, various pistols and edged weapons, the helmets he wore while fighting for Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars, and most of the Loeb Classical Library, the Harvard University Press series that contains the great Greek and Roman masters from Cicero to Aristotle. “I bring one or two of these on flights for reading,” he said.
At 83 years old, Luttwak remains a dynamo. He still writes columns and does research projects for the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Forces. He is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German. He speaks conversational Japanese and reads ancient Greek and Latin. And for a few weeks each year, he visits his Bolivian cattle ranch in the Amazon.
“In the evening, after drinking from the river, the cows form a circle and their calves are in the center,” he told me. “And then the bulls gather around the cows.” That is how they protect themselves from predators like jaguars, pumas, and Amazonian wolves.
Over Campari and soda, Luttwak held court on everything from the wonders of bovine digestion (their stomachs and intestines turn grass into bone, milk, hoof, and meat) to the loss of Europe’s culture of military heroism (Finland and Switzerland, he said, have the only armies in Europe that know how to fight). Luttwak is known for his unsentimental assessments of geopolitics. While most foreign policy mandarins in Washington bemoaned the humanitarian cost of the Syrian civil war, Luttwak wrote in The New York Times about the virtues of letting both sides kill each other.
