Shadow Government contributors

Steve Biegun

Steve Biegun was senior policy advisor for national security issues with the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign.

Earlier he served as national security advisor to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. From 2001-2003, Biegun served in the White House as executive secretary of the National Security Council and performed the functions of chief operating officer. During the 13 years before he joined the White House staff, Biegun was foreign-policy advisor to members of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

From 1992-1994, Biegun was resident director in the Russian Federation for the International Republican Institute, a democracy-building organization established under the National Endowment for Democracy. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.

Biegun graduated from the University of Michigan, where he studied political science and the Russian language. 

Daniel Blumenthal

Dan Blumenthal is a current commissioner and former vice chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, where he directs efforts to monitor, investigate, and provide recommendations to the Congress on the national security implications of the economic relationship between the two countries. Previously, he was senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs and practiced law in New York prior to his government service. At AEI, he focuses on America's policy and strategy in the Asia Pacific and in particular the implications of U.S. China's rise power. He also coordinates the Tocqueville on China project, which examines the underlying civic culture of post-Mao China.

José R. Cárdenas

José R. Cárdenas is an associate with the consulting firm VisionAmericas, based in Washington, D.C. From 2004-2009, he served in various senior positions in the Bush administration working on inter-American relations, including in the U.S. Department of State, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he served as Acting Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean and oversaw nearly $1 billion in U.S. development assistance to the region. He also served as a Senior Advisor at the Organization of American States and as a senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He earned his M.A. from Georgetown University in 1985.

Peter D. Feaver

Peter D. Feaver, who received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1990, is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer professor of political science and public policy at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He is coeditor of Shadow Government.

Feaver was special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff at the White House from 2005-2007. From 1993-1994, Feaver served as director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council at the White House, where his responsibilities included the national security strategy review, counterproliferation policy, regional nuclear arms control, and other defense policy issues. He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and comoderates with Bill Arkin of Planet War, a discussion board on Washingtonpost.com.

In addition to numerous scholarly articles and policy pieces on American foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, information warfare, and U.S. national security, Feaver is also author of Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Harvard Press, 2003), and most recently, with Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler, a coauthor of Paying the Human Costs of War (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Jamie M. Fly

Jamie M. Fly is Executive Director of the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. dedicated to supporting U.S. international engagement. Prior to joining FPI, Mr. Fly served in the Bush administration at the National Security Council (2008-2009) and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (2005-2008) working on the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. For his work in the Department of Defense, he was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service.

Prior to his service in government, Mr. Fly worked for the Republican National Committee on President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Ohio and on the 2005 Presidential Inaugural Committee. Mr. Fly was a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2002-2004, where he worked on European and national security issues. He has worked at the World Bank and interned at the American Enterprise Institute, the American Embassy in London, and the United States Senate.

He blogs regularly at The Weekly Standard Online and his articles and reviews have been published in Commentary, Forbes.com, ForeignPolicy.com, National Review, National Review Online, Politico, USNews.com, and The Weekly Standard. Mr. Fly was a 2004 German Marshall Fund Manfred Wörner fellow, 2009 Claremont Institute Lincoln fellow, and he participated in the 2004 Aspen Institute's Transatlantic Young Leaders Program in Berlin, the 2006 Atlantik Brücke German-America Young Leaders Conference, and the 2006 Bucerius Summer School on Global Governance. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

He received a B.A. in International Studies and Political Science from American University and an M.A. in German and European Studies from Georgetown University.

Aaron L. Friedberg

Aaron L. Friedberg is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1987.

From 2001-2002 Friedberg was the first Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress. Friedberg was a deputy assistant for national security affairs in the office of the vice president from 2003-2005. After leaving government to return to Princeton University, Friedberg was named a member of the Defense Policy Board and the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion.

Friedberg, who earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. from Harvard University, is the author of two books, The Weary Titan, 1895-1905: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline (Princeton University Press, 1988) and In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Michael J. Green

Michael J. Green is senior advisor and Japan chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and also associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University. From 2001 through 2005 he served on the National Security Council staff, first as director for Asian affairs responsible for Japan, Korea, and Oceania, and then as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asian affairs. He has previously taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and held positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Institute for Defense Analyses. He is the author of Japan's Reluctant Realism (2001) and coeditor of Asia's New Multilateralism (2008) among other books and monographs on Asia.

He worked as a foreign-policy advisor to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and currently serves on the advisory boards of the Center for a New American Security and the America-Australia Leadership Dialogue, as vice chair of the congressionally mandated U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission; and on the editorial board of the Washington Quarterly. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and received his MA and Ph.D. from SAIS, with further fellowships at MIT and Tokyo University. He has a black belt in Iaido (sword) and has led the award-winning City of Washington Pipe Band to victory in the North American and World Pipe Band Championships.

John Hannah

John Hannah is currently a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. John served on former Vice President Dick Cheney's national security affairs staff from 2001-2009, including as the vice president's national security advisor during the Bush administration's second term. John's government service also includes two stints at the State Department during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.  .

William Inboden

William Inboden is Senior Vice-President of the Legatum Institute, which publishes the Prosperity Index. He is coeditor of Shadow Government.

Most recently he served as Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council at the White House, where he worked on a range of foreign policy issues including the National Security Strategy, democracy and governance, contingency planning, counter-radicalization, and multilateral institutions and initiatives.  Prior to that, Inboden worked at the Department of State as a Member of the Policy Planning Staff and a Special Advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom.

Inboden was also a Civitas Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and has worked as a staff member in both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. He has lectured widely in academic and policy settings, and received numerous research and professional development fellowships. His book Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment, is published by Cambridge University Press.  Inboden received his Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. degrees in history from Yale University, and his A.B. from Stanford University. 

David J. Kramer

David J. Kramer joined the German Marshall Fund of the United States as a Senior Transatlantic Fellow in May 2009.  Before that he had served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from March 2008 to January 2009. He also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, responsible for Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus affairs as well as regional non-proliferation issues.

Previously, he served as a Professional Staff Member in the Secretary of State's Office of Policy Planning. Before that he served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. He also was Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in Washington.

Before joining the Government, he was a Senior Fellow at the Project for the New American Century, Associate Director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Assistant Director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, all in Washington.

Prior to moving to Washington, he was a Lecturer in Russian Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. and a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University.  He also served as an analyst for the Christian Science Monitor Network during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A native of Massachusetts, Kramer received his M.A. in Soviet studies from Harvard University and his B.A. in Soviet Studies and Political Science from Tufts University.  

Mark Lagon

Ambassador Mark P. Lagon is Executive Director of Polaris Project, a leading anti-human trafficking nonprofit running the primary national hotline, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (1-888-3737-888). 

Previously he was Ambassador-at-Large and Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP). In this capacity, he was Chair of the Senior Policy Operating Group coordinating U.S. domestic and global anti-trafficking policy.  From 2004 to 2007, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, responsible for U.S. human rights, humanitarian, and reform policy at the UN. He served on Secretary of State Colin Powell's Policy Planning Staff from 2002 until 2004. And from 1999 to 2002, he was a senior staff member at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, responsible for UN, sanctions, and human rights policy. 

Lagon has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow specializing in China policy, Deputy Staff Director of the House Republican Policy Committee, and chief aide to the Foreign Policy Studies Director at the American Enterprise Institute. He has also been a visiting and adjunct professor at Georgetown University and the Institute of World Politics. He is author of the book, The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War's Last Chapter. He has a Ph.D. from Georgetown University and a B.A. from Harvard University in Government.

Phil Levy

Phil Levy is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies international economic and development issues.

From 2005-2006 he was a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff. From 2003-2005 he was Senior Economist for Trade on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. For the 9 years before that, he was on the economics faculty of Yale University, including one year as Academic Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

He is a graduate of the University of Michigan (A.B. in Economics) and Stanford University (Ph.D. in Economics).

Tom Mahnken

Thomas G. Mahnken is a Visiting Scholar at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Between 2006 and 2009, he served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning. In that capacity, he advised the Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on strategy and planning.

Prior to joining the Defense Department, he served as a Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. From 2004 to 2006 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Merrill Center at SAIS. During the 2003-04 academic year, he served as the Acting Director of the SAIS Strategic Studies Program.

Mahnken earned his BA from the University of Southern California and his MA and Ph.D from Johns Hopkins SAIS. The is the author of Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Strategic Studies: A Reader (Routledge, 2007). He is also editor of The Journal of Strategic Studies.

Mitchell Reiss

Mitchell Reiss is the diplomat-in-residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia where he has held a number of leadership positions including vice provost for international affairs, dean and director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies; he also holds appointments in the School of Law and the Government Department.

Reiss was director of the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, where he provided Secretary Colin L. Powell with independent strategic advice and policy recommendations from 2003-2005. In 2003, he was asked to serve concurrently as the President's special envoy for the Northern Ireland Peace Process with the rank of Ambassador; in 2005 Secretary Condoleezza Rice asked Reiss to continue in this position, which he did until February 2007. 

Prior to coming to William & Mary in 1999, Reiss helped manage the start-up and operations of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), a multinational organization designed to deliver $6 billion of energy (500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil/year and two 1,000 MW nuclear power stations) to North Korea. He led KEDO's negotiations with the North Koreans and served as its first General Counsel.

Reiss has a law degree from Columbia Law School, a D.Phil. from Oxford University, a Master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and a B.A. from Williams College. He has written two books on international security, contributed to eighteen others, and published over 80 articles and reviews. He is currently conducting research on how states negotiate with rogue regimes and terrorist groups.

Kori Schake

Kori Schake is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and holds the Distinguished Chair in International Security Studies at the United States Military Academy.

She was senior policy advisor to the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign. She has held appointments on the National Security Council staff, the Joint Staff, the office of the secretary of defense, and on the State Department's policy planning staff. She has also taught in the faculties of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, and the National Defense University. She is the author of Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance (Hoover Institution Press, 2009).

Kristen Silverberg

Kristen Silverberg recently served as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. From 2005 to 2008, she was Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. She previously held a number of positions in the White House, including Deputy Assistant to the President and Advisor to the Chief of Staff. In 2003, she served in Baghdad, Iraq.

Ambassador Silverberg formerly practiced law at Williams and Connolly, LLP in Washington, D.C. She was a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals.  She graduated from Harvard College and the University of Texas School of Law.

Michael Singh

Michael Singh is an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).

During his three years in the White House, Singh was responsible for devising and implementing strategies on a wide range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process, to supporting Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, to the efforts to prevent Iran's acquisition of nuclear-weapons capability.

Prior to his time at the NSC, Singh served as special assistant to Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. In addition, he served at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv as a staff assistant to then-Amb. Daniel Kurtzer. After nearly eight years in the foreign service, Mr. Singh left government in August 2008.

Singh received his B.A. in economics and Near Eastern studies from Princeton University. He resides in Boston.

Daniel Twining

Daniel Twining is senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. During the Bush administration, he served as a member of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's policy planning staff, with responsibility for South Asia and regional issues in East Asia. He previously worked for over a decade for Senator John McCain, including as his Foreign Policy Advisor in the United States Senate.

Dan has also been the Fulbright/Oxford Scholar at Oxford University, a Transatlantic Fellow and Director of the Foreign Policy Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and a staff member of the United States Trade Representative. His work on South and East Asia and U.S. foreign policy has been published in newspapers, magazines, and peer-reviewed academic journals in the United States, Europe, and Asia (a full list of publications is available here). He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford; Nuffield College, Oxford; and the University of Virginia. He lived and worked in India from 2006-2007 and has also lived in Thailand, Great Britain, Benin, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso.

All views expressed in Shadow Government are his own.

Dov S. Zakheim

Dov S. Zakheim is a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm, Zakheim works with U.S. combatant commanders and allied and coalition ministries of defense worldwide. He is also a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Zakheim served as the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense (DOD) from 2001-2004. As comptroller, he was the secretary of defense's principal advisor on financial and budgetary matters. From 2002-2004, Zakheim was DOD's coordinator of civilian programs in Afghanistan.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, he served as a senior foreign-policy advisor to then-Gov. George W. Bush. Zakheim held several other DOD posts from 1981-1985. And from 1985-1987, he was deputy under secretary of defense for planning and resources in the office of the under secretary of defense (Policy). Prior to that, he was a principal analyst in the national security and international affairs division of the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition to teaching as an adjunct professor at the National War College, Yeshiva University, Columbia University, and Trinity College in Hartford, Ct., Zakheim has served on a number of government, corporate, non-profit, and charitable boards and authored numbers books and articles. A 1970 graduate of Columbia University with a B.A., summa cum laude, Zakheim also studied at the London School of Economics. He holds a doctorate in economics and politics at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, where he held three fellowships. He is the three-time recipient of the Defense Department's highest civilian award. 

Philip Zelikow

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

He was counselor at the Department of State, a deputy to Secretary Rice, from 2005-2007. From 1998-2005, Zelikow directed the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs as well as three bipartisan commissions, including the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) from 2003-2004. Previously, Zelikow served as a career foreign service officer at State and on the White House National Security Council staff. He is currently a member of the board for the global development program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Zelikow received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Redlands, a law degree from the University of Houston, and his master's and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

He is the author of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Belknap Press, 1997) with Ernest R. May; Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Graham Allison (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999); and Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft, with Condoleezza Rice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).