Election 2024: Foreign policy choices

Brian Katulis is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute, leading its overall policy research effort. Before joining MEI, Katulis was a senior fellow on the national security team at the Center for American Progress. He began his career in the 1990s in Egypt, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. He organized an international delegation led by former President Jimmy Carter to the first Palestinian elections in January 1996 and served on the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State and at the National Security Council in the Near East and South Asian Affairs directorate under President Bill Clinton. He is the co-author with Nancy Soderberg of The Prosperity Agenda. Katulis graduated with a BA in history from Villanova University and received his MPA from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology and the defense industrial base working group. He is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and also co-directs the Africa Security Initiative. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington Universities and is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He also serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense. He holds an AB, MSE, MA, and PhD from Princeton University, and his latest book is Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861 (2023). 

Eric Edelman, a Miller Center 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 Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs.