Iskander Rehman

Iskander Rehman is an Assistant Professor at the Clements Center for National Security at The University of Texas at Austin. His work focuses on applied history, grand strategy, and Asian security. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Prior to joining the Clements Center, Dr. Rehman was a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Over the course of his career, he has worked at a number of research centers and think tanks, including the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the American Foreign Policy Council, and the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 

His work on contemporary defense issues or the history of strategy has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes, and been featured in The Economist, The Financial Times and Bloomberg News, among others. He is the author of the Adelphi volume Planning for Protraction: A Historically Informed Approach to Great Power War and Sino-US Competition (2023) and of Iron Imperator: Roman Grand Strategy under Tiberius (2024). 

Dr. Rehman is currently working on a book manuscript on the evolution of French grand strategy toward Habsburg Spain from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. He also writes a regular column on applied history for War on the Rocks. 

He holds a master’s and PhD, with distinction, from the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Paris.