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New Atlanticist

Jun 7, 2012

Anchoring the Alliance: A Path to Turkish Leadership in the Alliance

By R. Nicholas Burns Damon Wilson and Jeffrey Lightfoot

If NATO hopes to maintain a central role in shaping its strategic neighborhood, it will need Turkey to take on a position of leadership within the Alliance. Within the next decade, a Turkish Secretary General should lead the Alliance. But for that to happen Turkey will have to act like the responsible power it should […]

European Union International Organizations

New Atlanticist

Jun 6, 2012

Anchoring the Alliance: A Stronger Germany

By R. Nicholas Burns Damon Wilson and Jeffrey Lightfoot

For NATO to succeed in the future, the Alliance needs a stronger Germany. One senior Alliance official labeled Germany a “lost nation” in its political and military leadership. Europe’s future relevance as a global strategic partner of the United States is contingent on Germany taking its full place as a much stronger political and military […]

NATO Security & Defense

New Atlanticist

May 24, 2012

Anchoring the Alliance: An Atlanticist France

By R. Nicholas Burns Damon Wilson and Jeffrey Lightfoot

For over sixty years, an ambivalent France sat at the center of the Alliance. For NATO to thrive in the decades ahead, it needs an energetic France to sustain its Atlanticist instincts. That is particularly important now that François Hollande has been elected as France’s new President. One of Nicolas Sarkozy’s most notable accomplishments as […]

France NATO

Jeffrey Lightfoot is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He currently serves as the program director for Europe at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and leads CIPE’s Europe-wide office in Bratislava, Slovakia. In this capacity, he is responsible for directing and growing CIPE’s programming within the European Union member states and developing CIPE’s relationship with European institutions.

Before joining CIPE, he was a vice president at Jones Group International, an international business advisory firm headed by former NATO commander and US national security advisor General James L. Jones. Prior to joining Jones Group International in 2014, Lightfoot worked for six and a half years at the Atlantic Council, rising to the level of deputy director at the Brent Scowcroft Center. While at the Council, Lightfoot served as project rapporteur or report author for numerous, high-level Atlantic Council studies on the most pressing issues for US foreign policy, including US-Pakistan relations, US-Central Asian relations after Afghanistan, NATO, US-Russia relations, and US security assistance to Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia.

Lightfoot has authored op-eds and articles for Defense News, CNN, the Boston Globe, the National Interest, the Fletcher Forum, the German Council on Foreign Relations, and La Revue International et Strategique, among others.

Lightfoot holds a master’s degree in European and Eurasian studies from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and bachelor’s degrees in French, business and international affairs from Indiana University Bloomington. He is fluent in French and is learning Slovak.