Two years into the Ukraine War

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. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global (2013) and co-author (with Strobe Talbott) of Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (2010). He has published articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade.

Alexander Bick recently joined the University of Virginia faculty as associate professor of practice at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He previously served in the Biden administration as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council and as senior advisor and a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. Among other responsibilities, he led the interagency "Tiger Team" charged with planning for Russia's invasion of Ukraine and helped to develop the 2022 National Security Strategy of the United States. Earlier in his career, he served at the State Department and National Security Council in the Obama administration, where his work focused on Syria. He helped to establish the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Bick holds a PhD in history from Princeton University. His first book, Minutes of Empire, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Dale Copeland, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is the Hugh S. and Winnifred B. Cumming Memorial Professor of International Affairs in the UVA Department of Politics. Copeland specializes in security studies and political economy. He is the author of many publications, including Economic Interdependence and War, which examines the conditions under which inter-state trade will lead to either war or peace and won the 2017 Best Book Award of the International Studies Association. He is also the author of The Origins of Major War, which studies the rise and fall of great world powers and the devastation of system-wide war.

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.

Thomas E. Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a cofounder of Yale University’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies program and a research fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Center. Graham was special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, during which he managed a White House–Kremlin strategic dialogue. He was director for Russian affairs on the staff from 2002 to 2004. Graham was previously a Foreign Service officer for fourteen years, with two tours of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He also worked on Russian and Soviet affairs on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State and as a policy assistant in the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy. Graham holds a BA in Russian studies from Yale University and an MA in history and a PhD in political science from Harvard University.

Harry Harding, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is a specialist on Asia and U.S.-Asian relations. His major publications include Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949-1966; China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao; A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972; and a chapter on the Cultural Revolution in the Cambridge History of China. A University Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, Harding is also adjunct chair professor in the College of Social Science at National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he holds a Yushan Scholarship, the highest honor awarded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. Harding served as the founding dean of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy from 2009–14.

Syaru Shirley Lin, research professor at the Miller Center and a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and National Chengchi University in Taipei. Lin is the founder and chair of the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI) and a steering committee member of the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience under the World Economic Forum. Her book, Taiwan’s China Dilemma, analyzes the impact of the evolution of Taiwanese national identity on cross-Strait economic policy. Lin is currently writing a book on the challenges facing high-income societies in Asia Pacific, including inequality, demographic decline, inadequate policy and technological innovation, and threats to public health and environmental sustainability. Her commentaries frequently appear in both English and Chinese media. Previously, she was a partner at Goldman Sachs, where she led the firm’s private equity and venture capital efforts in Asia.

Scott C. Miller is the director of the Miller Center's Project on Democracy and Capitalism and a research assistant professor at the Miller Center. From 2019 to 2021, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in economic and business history at the Yale School of Management’s International Center for Finance. As an economic historian, Miller examines the development of modern economic systems, particularly during periods of instability and volatility. He is the author or co-author of numerous scholarly papers on economic history, financial crises, and the interplay between societal and economic change. He also has written or co-written 10 case studies on financial crises and economic development.

Stephen D. Mull, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, is vice provost for global affairs at the University of Virginia. Ambassador Mull has served in a broad range of U.S. national security positions, most recently as Acting Under Secretary for Political Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, working as the day-to-day manager of overall regional and bilateral policy issues, and overseeing the bureaus for Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Eurasia, the Near East, South and Central Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and International Organizations. He was lead coordinator for Iran Nuclear Implementation from August 2015 until August 2017 and was the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Poland and the Republic of Lithuania.

John Owen is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow and the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security; The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change 1510-2010; and The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order. A recipient of fellowships from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton Universities, Owen is a member of the editorial board of International Security and a faculty fellow at the UVA Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Philip B. K. Potter, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is a professor of politics and founding director of the National Security Policy Center in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He is also a university expert with the National Ground Intelligence Center, U.S. Army INSCOM. Potter has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Politics and the Journal of Global Security Studies and is an associate principal investigator for Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS). Potter has been a fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Mara Rudman is a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor 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 also serves on the 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission and the Howard University College of Arts and Sciences board of visitors. Rudman is a senior counselor at American Progress, where she most recently was executive vice president for policy, and she consults for Democracy Forward. Rudman’s 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 director of presidential studies, co-chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, and a professor of presidential studies. 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 and University 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).

The Honorable James B. Steinberg is the dean of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. From 2011 to 2016, Steinberg was dean of Syracuse University's Maxwell School and University Professor of Social Science, International Affairs, and Law. He was Deputy Secretary of State from 2009 to 2011, serving as the principal deputy to Secretary Clinton. From 2005 to 2008 he was dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and before that was vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He also served as deputy national security advisor to President Clinton from 1996 to 2000. Steinberg received his BA from Harvard University and a JD from Yale Law School.

Yuri Urbanovich is an associate professor, general faculty, teaching in the departments of politics and Slavic languages and literatures, and in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies at the University of Virginia. He specializes in problems of disarmament, international negotiations, national negotiating styles, nationalism and ethnic conflict, societies in transition, politics in Russia and the post-Soviet region, and U.S.–Russian relations. He holds an MA in international relations from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) and a PhD in international relations from the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.