Ira Straus is a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Straus began his career at the Association to Unite the Democracies—an organization formed in 1939 whose offshoot, the Atlantic Union Committee, was one of the founding constituent organizations of the Atlantic Council. His early work focused on the theories and experience of European and Atlantic integration, including by bringing together longstanding Western Atlanticists with new Eastern European and Russian Atlanticists to form the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO—the first Western nongovernmental organization devoted to NATO enlargement and adaptation.

Straus later spent two years as a Fulbright professor in Moscow, teaching courses on international relations and Atlantic integration at several universities including Moscow State University, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and the Higher School of Economics. He was twice a short-term scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. In 2016, Straus became chair of the Center for War/Peace Studies.

Straus holds a BA from Princeton University and a PhD from the University of Virginia.