Trump's strike against Venezuela

Alexander Bick, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is associate professor of practice in public policy in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He brings more than twenty years of experience in national security policy and research, including senior roles in the U.S. government, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions. Bick served as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the first year of the Biden administration. In that role, he led the “Tiger Team” charged with planning the U.S. response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and helped to craft the 2022 National Security Strategy. Later, he served as a senior advisor and member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State.

Eric Edelman, a Miller Center 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 Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs.

David Leblang is the Randolph P. Compton Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center and the director of policy research. Leblang is also the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics and a professor of public policy at the University's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. A scholar of international political economy, Leblang has published broadly on topics including political development, global financial markets, international economic crises, and global migration. His most recent book, The Ties that Bind: The Political Economy of Global Immigration (with Benjamin Helms), was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.

Cristina Lopez-Gottardi Chao is assistant professor and chair of public programming at the Miller Center. Prior to her appointment in 2007, Lopez-Gottardi Chao held positions at Emory University’s Institute for Comparative and International Studies, the University of Miami’s North-South Center, and Barclays Bank Latin American Regional Office. Lopez-Gottardi Chao’s scholarship examines the evolving nature of U.S.-Cuban relations, the state of human rights on the island, and Cuba’s opposition and dissident movement, considering prospects for democratization from this sector. Her dissertation, The Growth of Opposition in Cuba: Problems and Prospects for Democratization, was awarded the 2005 Alberto J. Varona Prize for best dissertation in Cuban studies.

Dan Restrepo is Co-Founder of Dinámica Americas, a strategic consulting firm which provides advice to those engaged in or exploring business and philanthropic opportunities in the Americas and Spain. He is Board Chair for the Equis Institute and is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Restrepo has worked at the highest levels of all three branches of the U.S. Federal government; has advised on Latin America and Latino issues in each of the past 7 U.S. presidential campaigns; worked on the last two Democratic presidential transitions; and served as principal advisor to President Obama on issues related to Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Restrepo is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

Mara Rudman is a practitioner senior fellow at the Miller Center, where she directs the Ripples of Hope Project aimed at identifying practical approaches to help democratic leaders resolve key challenges. She previously served as a Miller Center Schlesinger Distinguished Professor and on the 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission. She serves on the Howard University College of Arts and Sciences board of advisors and consults for Democracy Forward. She was previously executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, and her government positions have included serving as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs in the Obama and Clinton administrations; deputy envoy for the Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace at the U.S. Department of State; assistant administrator for the Middle East at the U.S. Agency for International Development; and chief counsel to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She received an AB from Dartmouth College and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Marc Selverstone is the Miller Center's Gerald L. Baliles Professor of Presidential Studies, the center's director of presidential studies, and co-chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program. He earned a BA in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard) and Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. As chair of the Recordings Program, Selverstone edits the Secret White House Tapes of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. He is the general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition, the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes, published by the University of Virginia Press.

Allan C. Stam is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, a University Professor, professor of public policy and politics, and former dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia.  Previously, he was director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and professor of political science and senior research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Among other books, he is the author of The Behavioral Origins of War (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and Why Leaders Fight (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Robert (Bob) Strong, a Miller Center nonresident faculty senior fellow, is emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University. His research involves presidential foreign policy decisions in the modern era. He was a Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin for the 2013-14 academic year and a visiting scholar at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University in 2005. From 2008 to 2013, Strong served in senior administrative positions at Washington and Lee, first as associate provost and then as interim provost. Before W&L, he taught at Tulane University and the University College of Wales. His book publications include Character and Consequence: Foreign Policy Decisions of George H. W. Bush; Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy and Decisions and Dilemmas: Case Studies in Presidential Foreign Policy Making Since 1945. He earned his PhD at the University of Virginia.

William J. Antholis has served as director and CEO of UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs since January 2015. In that time, the Miller Center has strengthened its position as the leading nonpartisan research institution on the American presidency and worked with scholars across the University of Virginia to deliver vital research to policymakers and the public. Before coming to the Miller Center, Antholis served as managing director at the Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014, working directly with Brookings’s president and vice presidents. He also served at the U.S. Department of State and National Security Council. Antholis is the author of two books and dozens of articles on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade. He holds a BA from UVA and a PhD from Yale University.