Shadow Government contributors

Steve Biegun

Steve Biegun was senior policy advisor for national security issues with the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign.

Earlier he served as national security advisor to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. From 2001-2003, Biegun served in the White House as executive secretary of the National Security Council and performed the functions of chief operating officer. During the 13 years before he joined the White House staff, Biegun was foreign-policy advisor to members of both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

From 1992-1994, Biegun was resident director in the Russian Federation for the International Republican Institute, a democracy-building organization established under the National Endowment for Democracy. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.

Biegun graduated from the University of Michigan, where he studied political science and the Russian language. 

Christian Brose

Christian Brose is a senior editor at Foreign Policy and editor of Shadow Government.

From 2005-2008, he was chief speechwriter and policy advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In that capacity, he managed the speechwriting office for Secretary Rice, and later Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, helping to draft their remarks on every issue of U.S. foreign policy. He accompanied Secretary Rice on official travel to 24 countries, and he offered independent advice on policy and strategic communications as a member of her Policy Planning Staff. He is a recipient of the U.S. State Department's Distinguished Service Award.

From 2004-2005, Brose was a speechwriter to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. Prior to his government service, he was the assistant managing editor of The National Interest and The Public Interest. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he studied political science. He was born in Philadelphia.

Peter D. Feaver

Peter D. Feaver, who received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1990, is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer professor of political science and public policy at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.

Feaver was special advisor for strategic planning and institutional reform on the National Security Council staff at the White House from 2005-2007. From 1993-1994, Feaver served as director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council at the White House, where his responsibilities included the national security strategy review, counterproliferation policy, regional nuclear arms control, and other defense policy issues. He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and comoderates with Bill Arkin of Planet War, a discussion board on Washingtonpost.com.

In addition to numerous scholarly articles and policy pieces on American foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, information warfare, and U.S. national security, Feaver is also author of Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Harvard Press, 2003), and most recently, with Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler, a coauthor of Paying the Human Costs of War (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Aaron L. Friedberg

Aaron L. Friedberg is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1987.

From 2001-2002 Friedberg was the first Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress. Friedberg was a deputy assistant for national security affairs in the office of the vice president from 2003-2005. After leaving government to return to Princeton University, Friedberg was named a member of the Defense Policy Board and the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion.

Friedberg, who earned his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. from Harvard University, is the author of two books, The Weary Titan, 1895-1905: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline (Princeton University Press, 1988) and In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Mitchell Reiss

Mitchell Reiss is the diplomat-in-residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia where he has held a number of leadership positions including vice provost for international affairs, dean and director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies; he also holds appointments in the School of Law and the Government Department.

Reiss was director of the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, where he provided Secretary Colin L. Powell with independent strategic advice and policy recommendations from 2003-2005. In 2003, he was asked to serve concurrently as the President's special envoy for the Northern Ireland Peace Process with the rank of Ambassador; in 2005 Secretary Condoleezza Rice asked Reiss to continue in this position, which he did until February 2007. 

Prior to coming to William & Mary in 1999, Reiss helped manage the start-up and operations of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), a multinational organization designed to deliver $6 billion of energy (500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil/year and two 1,000 MW nuclear power stations) to North Korea. He led KEDO's negotiations with the North Koreans and served as its first General Counsel.

Reiss has a law degree from Columbia Law School, a D.Phil. from Oxford University, a Master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and a B.A. from Williams College. He has written two books on international security, contributed to eighteen others, and published over 80 articles and reviews. He is currently conducting research on how states negotiate with rogue regimes and terrorist groups.

Kori Schake

Kori Schake is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and holds the Distinguished Chair in International Security Studies at the United States Military Academy.

She was senior policy advisor to the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign. She has held appointments on the National Security Council staff, the Joint Staff, the office of the secretary of defense, and on the State Department's policy planning staff. She has also taught in the faculties of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, and the National Defense University. She is the author of Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance (Hoover Institution Press, 2009).

Vance Serchuk

Vance Serchuk is foreign policy advisor to Senator Joe Lieberman.

All views expressed on this post, however, are solely his own and are written strictly in a personal capacity. Serchuk served as an  informal adviser on national security issues to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, including U.S. policy toward South Asia and the Middle East. He previously worked as a fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

He is a graduate of Princeton University, was a Fulbright scholar in the Russian Federation, and is currently completing his JD at Yale Law School.

Michael Singh

Michael Singh is an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).

During his three years in the White House, Singh was responsible for devising and implementing strategies on a wide range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process, to supporting Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, to the efforts to prevent Iran's acquisition of nuclear-weapons capability.

Prior to his time at the NSC, Singh served as special assistant to Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. In addition, he served at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv as a staff assistant to then-Amb. Daniel Kurtzer. After nearly eight years in the foreign service, Mr. Singh left government in August 2008.

Singh received his B.A. in economics and Near Eastern studies from Princeton University. He resides in Boston.

Dov S. Zakheim

Dov S. Zakheim is a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm, Zakheim works with U.S. combatant commanders and allied and coalition ministries of defense worldwide. He is also a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Zakheim served as the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense (DOD) from 2001-2004. As comptroller, he was the secretary of defense's principal advisor on financial and budgetary matters. From 2002-2004, Zakheim was DOD's coordinator of civilian programs in Afghanistan.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, he served as a senior foreign-policy advisor to then-Gov. George W. Bush. Zakheim held several other DOD posts from 1981-1985. And from 1985-1987, he was deputy under secretary of defense for planning and resources in the office of the under secretary of defense (Policy). Prior to that, he was a principal analyst in the national security and international affairs division of the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition to teaching as an adjunct professor at the National War College, Yeshiva University, Columbia University, and Trinity College in Hartford, Ct., Zakheim has served on a number of government, corporate, non-profit, and charitable boards and authored numbers books and articles. A 1970 graduate of Columbia University with a B.A., summa cum laude, Zakheim also studied at the London School of Economics. He holds a doctorate in economics and politics at St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, where he held three fellowships. He is the three-time recipient of the Defense Department's highest civilian award. 

Philip Zelikow

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

He was counselor at the Department of State, a deputy to Secretary Rice, from 2005-2007. From 1998-2005, Zelikow directed the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs as well as three bipartisan commissions, including the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) from 2003-2004. Previously, Zelikow served as a career foreign service officer at State and on the White House National Security Council staff. He is currently a member of the board for the global development program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Zelikow received his baccalaureate degree from the University of Redlands, a law degree from the University of Houston, and his master's and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

He is the author of The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Belknap Press, 1997) with Ernest R. May; Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, with Graham Allison (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999); and Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft, with Condoleezza Rice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).