Rachel Rizzo is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, where her research focuses on US foreign policy, transatlantic security and economic relations, NATO, and US engagement with the Global South.

Before joining the Atlantic Council, Rizzo served as the director of programs at the Truman Center for National Policy and the Truman National Security Project, leading a team of senior fellows and managing the organization’s publications, events, and policy initiatives for a network of two thousand members nationwide.

From 2019 to 2020, she was a Robert Bosch fellow based in Berlin. There, she worked at the Berlin office of Human Rights Watch, conducting a research project on the European Union’s dual-use surveillance technology export policy, and then served as a visiting foreign policy advisor to a member of the German Bundestag. Rizzo also spent over five years at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC, and co-authored several of the think tank’s major reports. 

Rizzo often briefs senior policymakers from the US government, Congress, the European Union, and European governments. She writes for news publications as well as scholarly journals and is a frequent TV and print commentator on US foreign policy, providing analysis for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, and more. She covered the 2024 US presidential election for TV as a full-time on-air political analyst.

Rizzo holds a master’s degree in security policy studies from George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Utah. She began her career as a financial analyst with Goldman Sachs, working on the institutional fixed income sales desk.