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

Shield of the Republic
It’s Our Country, We Want it Back
While Eliot is on travel Eric welcomes LTG Sami Sadat whose poignant op-ed in the New York Times in August 2021 about the fall of Afghanistan described his personal feelings of betrayal by the US. He is a major figure in the National Geographic documentary Retrograde now airing on Disney+. They discuss the Biden Administration’s recent “Interim Report on Lessons Learned from the Afghanistan Withdrawal” and the contrast between it and the report of the Special Inspector General on Afghanistan, the relative responsibility of the Trump and Biden Administrations, the flaws in the Doha Agreement and the role that contractors played in sustaining Afghan National Security Forces. They also discuss the current humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan and the country’s future prospects.
Eric Edelman Shield of the Republic Podcast
The Dispatch
Smears and Myths—The October Surprise Revisited
Historical myths work in peculiar ways. A new revelation promises to shed new light on a familiar episode in tantalizing fashion. Nuance and context fall away. A certain ideal colonizes our imagination. Revisionism becomes orthodoxy. The left excels at this kind of intellectual gerrymandering, and one of its prized myths is that Ronald Reagan may have won the 1980 election because his campaign team conspired with Iranian revolutionaries to prolong the captivity of American officials held hostage. The New York Times took a stab at reviving this canard last month, touting the revelation of a “four-decade secret” about a trip with a “clandestine agenda.” The Reagan fantasy is just the most recent to use Iran as backdrop.
Eric Edelman The Dispatch
Shield of the Republic
The Drivers of Illiberalism
Eliot and Eric welcome Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). One of America’s most distinguished public intellectuals he is the author of several books including the End of History and the Last Man and, more recently, Liberalism and its Discontents. They discuss the impact of the war on Ukraine on the future of liberal democracy and the rules based international order, the drivers of populism and nationalism, the rise of illiberalism in both theory and practice, as well as the state of the academy and the situation in Georgia under the influence of Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Eric Edelman Shield of the Republic Podcast
Shield of the Republic
They Weren’t Stupid and They Weren’t Criminals
Eric and Eliot host Melvyn P. Leffler, the Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia to discuss his new book, Confronting Saddam: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. Mel describes why he decided to write the book and his findings that Bush rather than a cabal of neoconservatives was that key decision maker and that he adopted a strategy of coercive diplomacy to deal with the ongoing threat of Saddam’s regime. He discusses the Bush team’s motivations which he ascribes to fear, power, and hubris. He provides a critique of the decision-making and discusses the difficulty of writing contemporary history and alternative courses of action that Bush ought to have considered.
Eric Edelman Shield of the Republic Podcast
Shield of the Republic
Presidential Transitions & the Freedom Agenda
Eliot and Eric welcome back Duke Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the Program on American Grand Strategy, Peter Feaver, pinch-hitting for Meghan O’Sullivan (whose illness prevented her from joining us) to discuss Hand Off, a book that Peter and Meghan (along with SOTR guest Will Inboden) edited consisting of all the Bush 43 Administration’s NSC transition memos prepared for the Obama Administration. They touch on Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and China and whether or not “the Freedom Agenda” serves as a coherent framing of the Bush Administration foreign policies, the opportunity costs with Russia and China that resulted from the focus on the War on Terror, and much more.
Eric Edelman Shield of the Republic Podcast
MC Presents
The U.S. invasion of Iraq: 20 years later
A panel of foreign policy experts marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by discussing Melvyn P. Leffler’s new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. Looking back, what does this highly consequential foreign policy decision reveal about presidential leadership and decision making? How did Saddam Hussein's record as a brutal dictator influence the decisions made by George W. Bush? Leffler's extensive interviews with top Bush administration policymakers document the war's conflicting objectives and costly aftermath.
Eric Edelman Miller Center Presents