Experts

Eric Edelman

Practitioner Senior Fellow

Fast Facts

  • Career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service
  • Undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush Administration
  • Ambassador to Finland and Turkey
  • Recipient of Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service
  • Expertise on defense policy, nuclear policy and proliferation, diplomacy

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • American Defense and Security
  • War and Terrorism

Eric Edelman, practitioner senior fellow, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009, after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Edelman served as U.S. ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs. Edelman has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and several Department of State Superior Honor Awards. In January of 2011 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French government. In 2016, he served as the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center.

Eric Edelman News Feed

eric edelman speaking
The Fallout From a Lost Decade
Eric welcomes Eliot back from scenic Lake Champlain where Eliot communed with the spirit of Benedict Arnold. They host Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security and Ambassador (ret.) Robert Blackwill, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. They discuss Fontaine and Blackwell's new book Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024). They review the origins and history of "The Pivot" to Asia during the Obama Administration, the reasons that this rebalancing of U.S. power and policy to the East was not implemented, the various efforts to do so subsequently and the reasons that they too did not succeed, the trade-offs among U.S. responsibilities for security in Europe and the Middle East and re-orienting to the Indo-Pacific, the need for a substantial increase in defense spending, the lack of a real trade policy for East Asia, the balance between diplomacy and deterrence and whether or not productive diplomacy with an autocratic regime and leader like Xi Jinping is even possible.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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David Sanger on the New Cold Wars
Eric hosts New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, author of The Inheritance, Confront and Conceal, The Perfect Weapon and most recently New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion and America's Struggle to Defend the West. They discuss the tensions in the Biden-Zelensky relationship, the Biden Administration's efforts at "escalation management" during the war in Ukraine, and Russian nuclear threats and how seriously to take them.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Shield of the Republic Crosses the Century Mark
Eric and Eliot ruminate on the past 100 episodes of Shield of the Republic, looking back retrospectively on big takeaways about US national security since the show began in September 2021 in the shadow of the catastrophic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Israel's Current & Future Conundrum
Eliot returns from the Lennert Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, and he and Eric are joined by Bret Stephens, columnist for the New York Times, founding Editor-in-Chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversation. They discuss the war in Gaza, Israel's apparent lack of a strategy, the ICC decision to seek warrants for PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes, the anti-Israel bias of the UN system, the spread of anti-semitism on campus and beyond, the return of isolationism of both the left and the right, the prospects for this fall's election and the political failures of the Biden Administration, and the prospects for American resilience in the face of all this darkness.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Would China Risk it All?
Eric hosts Dale Copeland, Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics at UVA and faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. They talk about analysts who are either China "pessimists" who believe a conflict between the U.S. and China is unavoidable and China "optimists" who think it may be possible to avoid conflict.
Dale Copeland, Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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History's First Draft
To this growing literature historian and former U.S. government official Michael Kimmage has now added Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. The book is replete with literary and historical allusions that assert the conflict is a result of three collisions collectively shaking the global order and producing an international situation that the author suggests is more “combustible” than the Cold War or even World War II.
Eric Edelman American Purpose