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

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump
Trump’s Russophilia has become intelligence policy
The president has always had an unsettling relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime, but only recently has it infected the rest of the government.
Eric Edelman and David J. Kramer The Bulwark
JINSA
Leaving the JCPOA Behind: Principles for U.S. Diplomacy in Preventing a Nuclear Iran
Regardless of the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, it appears likely the winner will attempt renewed diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, either by trying to reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or pursuing a new agreement.
Eric Edelman JINSA
The New York Times
Top Republican National Security Officials Say They Will Vote for Biden
Four years after 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials warned that Donald J. Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history,” they are back with a new letter, declaring his presidency worse than they had imagined and urging voters to support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Eric Edelman The New York Times
Newsweek
Washington Must Address Turkey's Rising Aggression Amid COVID-19 | Opinion
Most of the headlines about COVID-19's global upheaval focus on how adversaries like China have begun acting more belligerently against U.S. interests. But increasingly, Turkey, formally a NATO ally, is also taking advantage of the pandemic to expand its influence in very destabilizing ways across the Eastern Mediterranean, an area of growing importance to the United States.
Eric Edelman Newsweek
JINSA
Reshaped After the Pandemic: Turkish Aggression in the Eastern Mediterranean
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s shake-up of domestic politics and international relations across the globe, Turkey is expanding its influence in the Eastern Mediterranean and creating challenging new conditions on the ground and offshore that the United States could struggle to address, and which threaten regional partners like Greece, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan summarized these destabilizing ambitions last month when he announced “Turkey will be one of the outstanding countries in the world that will be reshaped after the pandemic.” Washington’s own lack of focus on the region has helped invite Ankara’s growing aggressiveness, which in turn worsens security competition in an energy-rich region that increasingly resembles the South China Sea – with Turkey more and more playing the role of China.
Eric Edelman JINSA
Rudy Giuliani and two other men smoke cigars
The rise of strategic corruption
In recent years, a number of countries—China and Russia, in particular—have found ways to take the kind of corruption that was previously a mere feature of their own political systems and transform it into a weapon on the global stage.
Philip Zelikow, Eric Edelman, Kristofer Harrison, and Celeste Ward Gventer Foreign Affairs