The United States National Security Council (NSC) is the principal forum used by the president of the United States for consideration of national security, military, and foreign policy matters. Based in the White House, it is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and composed of senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials.
Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation, or a quasi-federal system.
Robert David Kaplan is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.
Ian Arthur Bremmer is an American political scientist, author, and entrepreneur focused on global political risk. He is the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm. He is also a founder of GZERO Media, a digital media firm.
Uzi Arad is an Israeli strategist and a well-known figure in foreign policy, security and strategic circles in Israel and abroad. He is a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv. Between 2009 and 2011 Arad served as the National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel, and the head of the Israeli National Security Council.
The Elliott School of International Affairs is the professional school of international relations, foreign policy, and international development of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. It is highly ranked in international affairs and is the largest school of international relations in the United States.
James George Stavridis is a retired United States Navy admiral, currently vice chair, global affairs and managing director of the global investment firm the Carlyle Group, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. Stavridis serves as the chief international diplomacy and national security analyst for NBC News in New York. He is also chair emeritus of the board of directors of the United States Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He is an associate fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and a member of the Inter-American Dialogue.
Jakub J. Grygiel is an Ordinary Professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and fellow at The Institute for Human Ecology. He is a senior advisor at The Marathon Initiative and a Visiting National Security Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a book review editor for Orbis. In 2017-2018 he was a senior advisor to the Secretary of State in the Office of Policy Planning working on European affairs. Before joining the Department of State, he was George H. W. Bush Associate Professor at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Grygiel was a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Markos Kounalakis is an American syndicated journalist and scholar who is the second gentleman of California as the husband of lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis. Kounalakis writes a syndicated weekly foreign affairs column for The Miami Herald and McClatchy-Tribune News and is a frequent foreign affairs analyst for CBS News and CNN International. Kounalakis' last syndicated weekly column appeared in the Miami Herald on November 6, 2020. His 2018 National Society of Newspaper Columnists award stated that "Kounalakis's world affairs columns not only offer strong prose and strong opinions, they offer an education." In 2019, he won a SPJ Sunshine State Award for his foreign affairs commentary and criticism.
Robert Edwards Hunter is an American government employee and foreign policy expert who served as United States ambassador to NATO during the Clinton administration.
Evelyn Nicolette Farkas is an American national security advisor, author, and foreign policy analyst. She is the current executive director of the McCain Institute, a nonprofit focused on democracy, human rights, and character-driven leadership.
The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. Its publication in 1997 was well received in Russia; it has had significant influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites, and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. Powerful Russian political figures subsequently took an interest in Dugin, a Russian political analyst who espouses an ultranationalist and neo-fascist ideology based on his idea of neo-Eurasianism, who has developed a close relationship with Russia's Academy of the General Staff.
Mary Beth Long is an American foreign policy expert, entrepreneur, and former U.S. Government official. From 2007–2009, Long served as the first woman confirmed by the U.S. Senate as an Assistant Secretary of Defense, and as such, was the first female civilian four-star military equivalent in the history of the Pentagon. She led the International Security Affairs (ISA) office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense responsible for policy for the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. She was also the first woman ever to be appointed as Chair of NATO's High Level Group (HLG), the highest-level responsible for NATO's nuclear policy and reporting directly to the Secretary General of NATO.
Robert ("Bob") McNally is an energy expert, author, consultant, and president of Rapidan Energy Group, a Washington D.C.-based energy market, policy, and geopolitical consulting firm he established in 2009. During the first term of President George W. Bush, McNally served on the White House staff as Special Assistant to the President on the National Economic Council and Senior Director for International Energy on the National Security Council. He is the author of the award-winning book Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices, which received a strongly favorable review by the Wall Street Journal and the leading energy academic publication The Energy Journal. Crude Volatility won the Honorable Mention in Economics in the 2018 PROSE Award recognizing outstanding scholarship and prose. The International Association for Energy Economics selected Crude Volatility as the winner of the 2023 Marcel Boiteux Best International Energy Economics Book Award. In 2021, The Washingtoniannamed Bob McNally one of Washington's Top 500 Most Influential People. McNally's professional career has focused on energy markets and policymaking, specializing in global oil fundamentals, geopolitical risk, and regulatory policies affecting conventional and alternative fuel markets.
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is a Sri Lankan academic, geopolitics and foreign policy analyst. He is a political columnist and author. He is a visiting professor for geopolitics and global leadership at Northern Kentucky University and a visiting lecturer in International Political Economy for The University of London in Sri Lanka Royal Institute of Colombo and teaches at the International Security at University of Colombo. Abeyagoonasekera has more than a decade of experience in government administration, serving as the head of several government institutions to positions at the board level. His commentaries on International Relations and Geopolitics are published by Observer Research Foundation New Delhi, London School of Economics and South Asia Journal. Abeyagoonasekera writes the monthly column Dateline Colombo for IPCS think tank in New Delhi.
Elkhan Nuriyev is a political scientist and a recognized expert on Russia, Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia and the Greater Middle East. He has published widely as a scholar, and he conducts regular briefings at the request of the international organizations and think tanks. He is frequently called on by government agencies, media, academic circles and private-sector institutions for comment and consulting on Russian foreign policy, Caucasus, wider Black Sea-Caspian Basin, Central Asia and regional security issues in post-Soviet Eurasia. In 2014, Nuriyev was a DAAD Senior Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. In 2015, he was a Humboldt Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. In 2017, Elkhan Nuriyev served as Corridors Fellow for Dialogue and Cooperation at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany. He is a Global Energy Associate at the Brussels Energy Club and is also a Senior Expert on Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia at L&M Political Risk and Strategy Advisory in Vienna. In 2019, Nuriyev worked as a Humboldt Senior Fellow at Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien (ZOiS) / Centre for East European and International Studies. In 2020, he was an Eastern Europe-Global Area (EEGA) Fellow at the Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University. In 2021, Elkhan Nuriyev worked as a Think Visegrad Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade (IFAT) in Budapest.
Georgios Katrougalos is a Greek jurist and politician who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from February to July 2019. He previously served as an Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs from 5 November 2016 to 15 February 2019, as the Minister of Labour and Social Solidarity from 23 September 2015 to 5 November 2016 and from 18 July 2015 to 28 August 2015. From 27 January 2015 to 17 July 2015 he served as an Alternate Minister of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction in Tsipras's first cabinet
Aaron Wess Mitchell is an American foreign policy expert and former diplomat who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from October 2017 until February 2019. Prior to assuming the role at State Department, he was president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis. On July 19, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Mitchell as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
Abishur Prakash is a Canadian businessman, author, and geopolitical expert. He is the CEO of The Geopolitical Business, an advisory firm based in Toronto, Canada. Prior to this, he worked as a futurist at Center for Innovating the Future, a foresight agency.
Julianne Smith is an American foreign policy advisor and diplomat who serves as the United States Permanent Representative to NATO in the Biden administration. She previously served as deputy national security advisor to then-Vice President Biden in the Obama administration.
