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

speakers
Georgia On My Mind
Eric and Eliot try to explain (for a foreign audience and American expats) how it is possible that the election is so close. They discuss the role of inflation, the border, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan as well as craziness on campus, and elite disdain for non-college educated Americans in fly-over country.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Trump’s National Security Advisers Fall Flat Defending Him
Robert’s testimony that Trump loves our soldiers flies in the face of John Kelly’s and Mark Esper’s revelations that he considers dead service members to be “suckers and losers” and that he didn’t like seeing wounded warriors because it was a “bad look” for him. Milley, Mattis, Kelly, and Esper have all been in the news recently calling Trump’s views and fundamental fitness into question. If the guy at the top is an unstable admirer of fascists, then what his foreign policy advisers think doesn’t really matter that much.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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How Do You Adapt Under Fire?
Eric and Eliot welcome Australian MG (ret.) Mick Ryan to the show to discuss his new book, "The War For Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation under Fire."
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Is Trump Actually a Fascist?
Eric and Eliot discuss a new play about President Dwight Eisenhower, Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground. They discuss the changing evaluation of Ike's presidency by historians and the pluses and minuses of his 8 years in office.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
eric and eliot speaking
October 7th: One Year Later
Eric and Eliot note the sad commemoration of the Hamas attack on Israel and the consequences that came in its wake. They touch on the shocking nature of the sexual violence, the denial of the attack and the reality of the horrific violence as well as the explosion of anti-semitism internaionally and, in particular, on US college campuses, they discuss the Israeli successes in attacking the Hezbollah leadership and military infrastructure in Lebanon (and the blindspot with regard to Hamas that the successes against Hezbollah represent).
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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An Unlikely Network of Dictatorships
Eric and Eliot welcome back Anne Applebaum, Pultizer and Duff Cooper Prize Winning author of Gulag and Red Famine and currently staff writer with The Atlantic and senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. They discuss Anne's new book, "Autocracy Inc: The Dictators who Want to Run the World."
Eric Edelman The Bulwark