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

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Trump Is Spooked by Putin’s Nuke Threats
President Trump appears to be falling into one of the same policy traps that hobbled the Biden administration’s approach to European security—the fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin might resort to using nuclear weapons to fight the war in Ukraine.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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A New Era of Economic Warfare
Eliot and Eric welcome Edward Fishman, Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy and Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University's SIPA program. They discuss the American tradition of reaching for economic sanctions as an alternative to kinetic military action or war and how U.S. policymakers have weaponized the role of the dollar in international finance to U.S. advantage.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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A Completely Unserious Pentagon
Eliot and Eric welcome Eliot's former Harvard student, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut's 4th Congressional District and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They discuss the latest news about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's Signal chats that included his wife, brother and personal attorney and which featured operational details of impending attacks on Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Is America Underestimating China?
Eric and Eliot discuss China's massive advantages of scale in the strategic competition with the United States and the metrics that can be used to measure it.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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To Preserve Extended Nuclear Deterrence in Europe an American Should be SACEUR
Recent press reports suggest that Pentagon leaders are considering a dramatic organizational change: relinquishing the traditional U.S. role of providing NATO with its Supreme Allied Commander (SACEUR). This would be deeply unwise and potentially dangerous for the United States, as well as for our European allies.
Eric Edelman Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments
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Trump’s New World Order
Eliot and Eric note this week’s jackassery—tariffing McDonald Island and Heard Island off Australia, almost exclusively inhabited by penguins, and Trump’s plan for a four-mile-long military parade to mark his birthday on June 14 and the anniversary of the United States Army. In a more sinister vein they discuss the absolute craziness of the NSC staff purge apparently orchestrated by conspiracy theorist and MAGA influencer Laura Loomer and the subsequent cashiering of NSA Director and Cybercom Commander Gen. Timothy Haugh (as well as his deputy) and the firing of Adm. Shoshana Chatfield as the U.S. military representative to NATO for various imagined DEI sins.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark