Matthew Kroenig

Matthew Kroenig is vice president for geostrategy and fellows and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In these roles, he manages the Scowcroft Center’s bipartisan team of more than thirty resident staff, including the: Geostrategy Initiative, Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, Transatlantic Security Initiative, Forward Defense, the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative, and the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense. He also oversees the Council’s fellows program and vast network of nearly 700 nonresident experts. His research focuses on US national security strategy, strategic competition with China and Russia, and strategic deterrence and weapons nonproliferation.

Kroenig was appointed by the US Congress as a commissioner on the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. 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.

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 eight 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 is a columnist 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. Politico named him “one of Washington’s most prolific foreign policy wonks.” He is Henry Kissinger’s designated literary representative, responsible for managing access to his vast collection of personal papers.

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.