Erin Walsh

Erin Walsh is a nonresident senior fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. She is also senior vice president at American Global Strategies and previously served as senior research fellow in the Asia Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Walsh held senior US government roles across the White House, National Security Council, Department of Commerce, Department of State’s Near Eastern Affairs Bureau, the US Mission to the United Nations, Blair House, and the Department of Energy. From 2018 to 2021, she served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for Africa and for international organizations at the National Security Council, leading interagency coordination on US policy toward Africa and directing US engagement at the United Nations and other multilateral venues. She previously served as assistant secretary of commerce for global markets and director general of the US and Foreign Commercial Service, overseeing trade promotion and investment strategy across offices in more than one hundred US cities and eighty countries. In early 2017, she was special assistant to the president and associate director for presidential personnel, and was appointed by the president as a US representative to the seventy-third session of the UN General Assembly. Earlier in her career, she spent twelve years in the private sector, serving as executive director and head of the Office of Corporate Engagement for Asia Pacific at Goldman Sachs and as senior manager in corporate affairs at Cisco.

Walsh holds a BA in government and international relations from Georgetown University and an MS from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was a research fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. She is a recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.