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

Eric Edelman discusses the brave Ukrainian resistance, Putin’s initial difficulties, and how the West is responding to the war.
Eric Edelman Conversations with Bill Kristol
The alliance can't afford to waste its unity and sense of purpose.
Eric Edelman and Daniel Fata The Bulwark
Eric and Eliot discuss Putin’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, what Eliot heard at the Munich Security Conference and in Poland last week, as well as what the West’s theory of victory should be in the conflict over Ukraine, and how should the U.S. and the West more broadly treat Russia now that it has become a pariah state.
Eric Edelman Shield of the Republic Podcast
Analyzing the Biden administration’s policy of making information about Russia’s movements and intentions public.
Eric Edelman The Dispatch
Eliot and Eric host CSIS's Jude Blanchette to discuss Neo-Maosim in China, the impact of Xi Jinping's personalistic authoritarianism on China's domestic and foreign policy, the Xi-Putin joint statement last week, and prospects for Sino-Russian relations, as well as Chinese science fiction and what it might tell us about Chinese society.
Eric Edelman Shield of the Republic Podcast
Conspicuously absent from the administration’s early priority list, however, was expanding the Abraham Accords, the flurry of peace deals that Donald Trump forged between Israel and four Arab states in the final months of his presidency. But with so many of Biden’s first-year initiatives now faltering or—as in Afghanistan—ending in outright debacle, his administration would be wise to turn its attention to the accords as a potential success story in an otherwise bleak foreign policy landscape.
Eric Edelman The Dispatch