Dr. Matthew Kroenig is vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In these roles, he manages the Scowcroft Center’s nonpartisan team of more than thirty resident staff and oversees the Council’s extensive network of nonresident fellows. His own research focuses on US national security strategy, strategic competition with China and Russia, and strategic deterrence and weapons nonproliferation.

Kroenig was a commissioner on the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States from 2022 to 2024. He previously served in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community during the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. He received the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Award for Outstanding Achievement. He was a national security adviser on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney (2012) and Marco Rubio (2016).

Kroenig is also a tenured professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. A 2019 study in Perspectives on Politics ranked him one of the top twenty-five most cited political scientists of his generation. He is the author or editor of seven books, including The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the US and China (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford University Press, 2018). Kroenig co-authors the bimonthly “It’s Debatable” column at Foreign Policy. His articles and commentary regularly appear in major media outlets, including: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Politico, CBS, BBC, CNN, Fox News, and NPR.

He has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard University, and Stanford University. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds an MA and PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.