Edward Luttwak appeared on Conversations With History a few years before his recent visit to promote The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.
He makes a number of points. He emphasizes that since liberal democracies won’t do what it takes to pacify an insurgency, they shouldn’t try to occupy foreign lands; they should disengage and rely on targeted strikes, if they resort to violence at all.
Also, our understanding of war is terribly distorted, he says, by the bias our experts bring to the subject. The academics studying international relations all come to the problem of conflict hating war — but plenty of people throughout history have been quite happy to go to war.
His opinions on the Middle East and China are perhaps more contrarian.