Jeffrey Lightfoot

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.