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 speaking
Shield of the Republic Crosses the Century Mark
Eric and Eliot ruminate on the past 100 episodes of Shield of the Republic, looking back retrospectively on big takeaways about US national security since the show began in September 2021 in the shadow of the catastrophic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Israel's Current & Future Conundrum
Eliot returns from the Lennert Meri Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, and he and Eric are joined by Bret Stephens, columnist for the New York Times, founding Editor-in-Chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversation. They discuss the war in Gaza, Israel's apparent lack of a strategy, the ICC decision to seek warrants for PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant for war crimes, the anti-Israel bias of the UN system, the spread of anti-semitism on campus and beyond, the return of isolationism of both the left and the right, the prospects for this fall's election and the political failures of the Biden Administration, and the prospects for American resilience in the face of all this darkness.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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Would China Risk it All?
Eric hosts Dale Copeland, Professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics at UVA and faculty senior fellow at the Miller Center. They talk about analysts who are either China "pessimists" who believe a conflict between the U.S. and China is unavoidable and China "optimists" who think it may be possible to avoid conflict.
Dale Copeland, Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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History's First Draft
To this growing literature historian and former U.S. government official Michael Kimmage has now added Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. The book is replete with literary and historical allusions that assert the conflict is a result of three collisions collectively shaking the global order and producing an international situation that the author suggests is more “combustible” than the Cold War or even World War II.
Eric Edelman American Purpose
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A Resurgence of Antiliberalism
Eric welcomes back Robert W. Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor at large at the Washington Post, to the show to discuss Kagan's new book, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart - Again. They discuss the origins of America's liberal tradition in the radicalism of the American Revolution. How the American Revolution differed from the French, the persistence of an anti-liberal tradition that from its inception was wrapped up with the defense of slavery and white supremacy. The persistence of that anti-liberal tradition in the 19th Century, today's Catholic integralism and Christian nationalism and the tensions between those schools of thought. The connections between anti-liberalism and America First and the connection to anti-semitism, left-wing anti-liberalism and the from whence the threat to American democracy is greatest, the stakes in the 2024 election and the global struggle against liberal democracy by Russian and Chinese autocrats.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark
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The Original America First Movement
Eliot and Eric welcome Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, and author of America Last: The Right's Century Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. They discuss the origin story of "America First" during the First World War when critic and satirist H.L. Mencken and German-American propagandist (and paid agent) George Sylvester Viereck led the charge against American intervention in the Great War and how both played roles in the 30s and early 40s America First movement to prevent FDR from aiding the Allies.
Eric Edelman The Bulwark