Anthony J. Ruggerio is a nonresident senior fellow at the Forward Defense initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is a senior vice president at American Global Strategies (AGS), leading the firm’s Economic Security and Financial Services Practice. He also co-leads the AGS election and political analysis initiative.
Ruggerio served in the US government for nearly twenty years in both Democratic and Republican administrations. In the first Trump administration, he was deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs as well as National Security Council senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense between 2019 and 2021. In this capacity, he advised the president, national security advisor, deputy national security advisor, and White House leadership on a wide range of issues, including weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, nonproliferation, biodefense, arms control, chemical weapons use in Syria, proliferation issues in Iran and North Korea, Ebola outbreaks in Africa, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to that, he served as the National Security Council director for North Korea (from 2018 to 2019), where he worked on the president’s maximum pressure policy and summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Ruggerio was a foreign policy fellow in the Office of Senator Marco Rubio, deputy director and then director (now a deputy assistant secretary position) in the Office of Global Affairs in the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes at the Department of the Treasury, and served more than thirteen years in various positions at the Department of State, including as an intelligence analyst and chief of the Defensive Measures and Weapons of Mass Destruction Finance Team.
He was senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program and a senior fellow at the institute. Ruggerio’s research focused on US sanctions policy; weapons of mass destruction programs in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, and China; COVID-19 origins; and Chinese money-laundering organizations’ role in the US fentanyl crisis. Ruggerio’s research has been cited by Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, Politico, and the New York Post. His work has been published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, NBC News, and the Hill.
