Brookings Big Ideas for America

An Agenda for the Nation

What are the biggest issues facing the country as Donald Trump and the GOP-led 115th Congress take office?

Any new administration faces a myriad of issues and problems it must take on as it ascends to power. In this volume, Brookings scholars and others offer their solutions, from Ben Bernanke and Richard Bush to Richard Reeves and Dayna Matthew, from Bob Reischauer and Alice Rivlin to Robert Kagan and Elaine Kamarck, to Belle Sawhill, Doug Elmendorf, David Wessel, Bill Galston, and Carol Graham, as well as many others.

These powerful essays engage and inform readers on a variety of timely, crucial issues that affect the present and the future of the United States. Much of the focus is on the threatened middle-class dream in America. On the domestic front, Brookings scholars tackle topics ranging from health care and jobs to economic opportunity and trade policy, to criminal justice and infrastructure. The alliance system, relationships with China and Mexico, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq are among the foreign policies issues addressed.

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He co-directs the Center on 21st Century Security and Intelligence there with retired General John Allen. O’Hanlon is also director of research for the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Princeton, and Syracuse universities and University of Denver.