Robert Carl "Bud" McFarlane was an American Marine Corps officer who served as National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985. Within the Reagan administration, McFarlane was a leading architect of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a project intended to defend the US from Soviet ballistic missile attacks. He resigned as National Security Adviser in late 1985 because of disagreements with other administration figures but remained involved in negotiations with Iran and with Hezbollah.
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. is an American political scientist. He and Robert Keohane co-founded the international relations theory of neoliberalism, which they developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power. His notion of "smart power" became popular with the use of this phrase by members of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration.
Stephen John Hadley is an American attorney and senior government official who served as the 20th United States National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009. He served under President George W. Bush during the second term of his administration. Hadley was Deputy National Security Advisor during Bush's first term. Before that Hadley served in a variety of capacities in the defense and national security fields. He has also worked as a lawyer and consultant in private practice.
Ashton Baldwin Carter was an American government official and academic who served as the 25th United States Secretary of Defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He later served as director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of the Carter administration. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Leslie Howard "Les" Gelb was an American academic, correspondent and columnist for The New York Times who served as a senior Defense and State Department official and later the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is an international affairs think tank, describing itself as "a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing knowledge and engagement in global affairs and empowering more people to help shape our global future." The organization is based in the Chicago Loop at Two Prudential Plaza.
Richard Kevin Betts is an American political scientist and international relations scholar who centers on U.S. foreign policy. He is currently the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies in the Department of Political Science, the director of the International Security Policy Program in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and former director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Kim R. Holmes is an author and former American diplomat and Assistant Secretary of State. From 2002 to 2005 he served as the United States Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; he was also Executive Vice-President of the Heritage Foundation, having served twice as the foundation’s Vice President of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies and Director of its Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies between 1992 and 2012.
Ivo H. Daalder, is President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and has served since July, 2013. He was the U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from May 2009 to July 2013. He is a specialist in European security. He was a member of the staff of United States National Security Council (NSC) during the administration of President Bill Clinton, and was one of the foreign policy advisers to President Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Frank Graham Klotz served as Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security and Administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. He was confirmed for the position on April 8, 2014, and retired on January 20, 2018.
Robert Edwards Hunter is an American government employee and foreign policy expert who served as United States ambassador to NATO during the Clinton administration.
Philip H. Gordon is an American diplomat and foreign policy professional. Since March 21, 2022, he has served as Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Earlier in his career, he was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2009–2011) and Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (2013–2015) during the presidency of Barack Obama.
Michael Paul Pillsbury is an author, and former public official in the United States. He has been the Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. since 2014. Before Hudson, he held various postings in the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Senate. He has been called a "China-hawk", and an "architect" of Trump's signature policy on China.
Lee Andrew Feinstein is an American policy-scholar, and former diplomat and senior official at the US Departments of State and Defense. Feinstein held senior positions on leading Democratic presidential campaigns in 2008. He served as the United States Ambassador to Poland from 2009 to 2012, appointed by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the US Senate. Feinstein is currently the inaugural dean at Indiana University's Lee H. Hamilton and Richard G. Lugar School of Global and International Studies. His nonpartisan scholarship has been recognized by leading Republicans and Democrats.
Catherine McArdle Kelleher was an American political scientist involved in national and international security policy. She was Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and College Park Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Kelleher was the Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin from 1998 to 2001 when she was appointed Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College (2001–2006). In the 1990s she was appointed Honorarprofessor at the Free University of Berlin, and she regularly taught at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland for over a decade.
James M. Goldgeier is a professor of international relations at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C., where he served as dean from 2011 to 2017.
Michael C. Horowitz is an American author and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Charles Frazer Hermann holds the Brent Scowcroft Chair in International Policy Studies at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is an expert in matters relating to American foreign policy, crisis management, and decision-making.
Mira Rapp-Hooper is an American political scientist and expert on security in the Asia-Pacific who serves as a senior advisor on China at the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. Her field of expertise includes Asia security issues, deterrence, nuclear strategy and policy, and alliance politics. She was previously a senior fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.
