Zoltán Fehér, PhD is a diplomat-scholar-geostrategist and a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub with more than twenty years of experience working in government, academia, and the private sector on international relations, foreign policy, grand strategy, and geopolitical risk, with special focus on the United States, China, and Central and Eastern Europe.
Previously, he served as a professional diplomat for Hungary for 12 years, working as foreign policy analyst at the Hungarian embassy in Washington DC, and as Hungary’s Deputy Ambassador and Acting Ambassador in Turkey. He has taught International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Summer School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and leading Hungarian universities. He worked as an assistant to Joseph Nye at the Harvard Kennedy School.
He earned his PhD in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. His doctoral dissertation, The Sources of American Conduct: U.S. Strategy, China’s Rise, and International Order, focuses on the origins of U.S.-China strategic competition and examines the evolution of U.S. strategy toward China in the early post-Cold War period. He has served as an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center at the University of Notre Dame, and a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation.
He consults for various international companies on geostrategy, geopolitical risk, and global affairs. He is also an Associate Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and a Nonresident Fellow at the John Lukacs Institute for Strategy and Politics at the Ludovika National University of Public Service – Hungary.
He holds a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Master of Arts in American History from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), a Law degree (J.D.) from Pázmány Catholic University (Budapest), and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.