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

shield of the republic description
The Long Shadow of the Evil Empire
Eric and Eliot host Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies based in Bologna, Italy. They discuss Sergey’s personal story of growing up in Sakhalin in the Soviet Union, living in China, becoming an historian and gaining access to documentary sources in both countries that were heretofore unavailable and which shed new light on the history of the Cold War.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
eric edelman speaking
Commission on the National Defense Strategy Report Readout
The Commission on the National Defense Strategy discusses their report describing the U.S. strategic threat environment, which will inform future budget requests, legislation, appropriations, and Department of Defense operations and planning.
Eric Edelman, Mara Rudman The Aspen Institute
G7 leaders stand on stage to announce a Joint Declaration of Support to Ukraine during the 2023 NATO summit.
Ghosts at the Banquet
Spectres from the political past attended the 2024 Washington NATO summit, writes Eric Edelman.
Eric Edelman Jerusalem Strategic Tribune
the bulwark headline
What's at Stake in the Global 2024 Elections?
Eric and Eliot discuss a series of upcoming elections, including in the UK on July 4 where the Tory Party (the oldest political party in the world) looks to be obliterated by a Labour landslide, France where President Macron's "party" looks likely to be squeezed out by Marine Le Pen's renovated version of the old anti-immigrant National Front and a New Popular Front of Leftist parties, and in Iran where reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian has emerged a real threat to conservative forces divided among Saaed Jalili, the former hard-line nuclear negotiator, Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Qalibaf, and a gaggle of other conservatives amidst broad public apathy and disinterest in the election.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
the bulwark podcast logo
Was Machiavelli the Father of Modern Grand Strategy?
Eric welcomes Professor Christopher Lynch, Chair of the Political Science Department at Missouri State University, the editor and translator of the most recent edition of Machiavelli's "The Art of War" and author of "Machiavelli on War." They discuss Machiavelli as statesman, military leader and diplomat and Machiavelli as Political Philosopher, "The Art of War" as a treatise on combined arms warfighting, Machiavelli as the father of modern grand strategy, whether Machiavelli was a "teacher of evil," his role as one of the progenitors of "realism" in international affairs, and whether his teachings prefigure our modern notions of strategic competition between authoritarian states and liberal democracies.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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