Ambassador Eric S. Edelman retired as a career minister from the US Foreign Service on May 1, 2009. He has served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House, where he led organizations providing analysis, strategy, policy development, security services, trade advocacy, public outreach, citizen services, and congressional relations. As undersecretary of defense for policy (August 2005-January 2009), he was DoD's senior policy official, overseeing strategy development with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counterproliferation, counternarcotics, counterterrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. He served as US ambassador to Finland in the Clinton administration and Turkey in the Bush administration and was Vice President Cheney's principal deputy assistant for national security affairs.
He is a distinguished fellow at the Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessment and a senior associate of the international security program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He also serves on the National Defense Panel, and on the bipartisan board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace.
Discussion is off-the-record and open only to current SAIS students, faculty, and staff.
Ambassador Eric S. Edelman, Roger Hertog Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins SAIS Moderated by Dr. Eliot Cohen, Director, Strategic Studies Program, Johns Hopkins SAIS