Robert Kagan, Leading Foreign Policy and National Security Expert, Joins Brookings

Robert Kagan, an expert on U.S. national security, foreign policy and U.S.-European relations, has joined the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow, Brookings President Strobe Talbott announced today.

Kagan joins the Foreign Policy program and will be affiliated with the Center on United States and Europe because of his important work on U.S. relations with Europe.

“We are delighted to have Bob’s intellectual firepower as we engage in the policy debate. His deep knowledge of U.S. foreign policy will make a significant contribution to Brookings’s work,” said Martin Indyk, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings.

Kagan comes to Brookings with extensive government credentials plus 13 years as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for the Washington Post and is a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard and the New Republic. On more than one occasion, Foreign Policy magazine named Kagan as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

From 1984 to 1988, Kagan served as a member of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and holds a Ph.D. in American history from American University.

Kagan is a prolific author on U.S. foreign policy issues. His most recent book is The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf, 2008). His previous book, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century, (Knopf, 2006) was the winner of the 2008 Lepgold Prize and a 2007 Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. His book, Of Paradise and Power (Knopf, 2003), was a New York Times bestseller, and a bestseller in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Canada. It has been translated into more than 25 languages. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (Free Press, 1996), and is co-editor with William Kristol of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign Policy (Encounter Books, June 2000).