Thomas Wright is a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Strategy, Security, and Technology at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He previously served as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration. He is the author of All Measures Short of War and coauthor, with Colin Kahl, of Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order. 

Constanze Stelzenmüller is an expert on German, European, U.S., and transatlantic foreign and security policy and strategy, as well as international law and human rights. She is the director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the inaugural holder of the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Transatlantic Relations at Brookings. She held the Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress from October 2019 to March 2020 and served as the inaugural Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at Brookings from 2014 to 2019.

Prior to working at Brookings, she was a senior transatlantic fellow (2009–2014) and Berlin office director (2005–2009) with the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). At GMF, she directed the influential Transatlantic Trends survey program and co-managed the “New Power, New Responsibility” project.

From 1994 to 2005, Stelzenmüller was a reporter and editor in the political section of DIE ZEIT. From 1998, she was defense and international security editor; previously, she had covered human rights, war crimes tribunals, and humanitarian crises.

Stelzenmüller’s essays and articles, in both German and English, have appeared in a wide range of publications, including Foreign Affairs, Internationale Politik, and The Washington Post. She writes a monthly column in the Financial Times. Her dissertation, “Direkte Demokratie in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” was published in 1994 by Nomos. She is a frequent commentator on U.S. and European radio and television, including PBS News Hour, NPR, and the BBC.

Stelzenmüller is an honorary governor of the Ditchley Foundation, a fellow of the Royal Swedish Society for War Sciences, and a board member of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung). She delivered the Lennart Meri Lecture at the 2025 Lennart Meri Conference in Talinn, the John McCloy Lecture at the 2024 John McCloy Transatlantic Forum in Frankfurt, the 2022 Guido Goldman Memorial Lecture at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

She was honored in 2025 with the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Order of Merit, Second Class, for her contribution to transatlantic relations and for upholding European values and the rules-based international order. Stelzenmüller was also the recipient of the Deutsches Haus at NYU’s 2025 Volkmar and Margret Sander Prize.

She has worked in Germany and the United States and speaks English, French, German, and Spanish. Stelzenmüller holds a doctorate in law from the University of Bonn (1992), a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (1988), and a law degree from the University of Bonn (1985). From 1988 to 1989, she was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School.

Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, former Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. He is the author of Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, (Cornell University Press 2014), Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Cornell University Press 1991), and The Sources of Military Doctrine (Cornell University Press 1984). The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University’s Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including “The Devastation of Gaza Was Inevitable,” Foreign Policy, Feb. 14, 2024; “Ukraine has a Breakthrough Problem,” Foreign Policy, Aug. 3, 2023; “Russia’s Rebound: How Moscow has partly recovered from its military setbacks,” Jan. 4, 2023; “Ukraine’s Implausible Theories of Victory: The Fantasy of Russian Defeat and the Case for Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, July 2022; “Europe Can Defend Itself,” Survival, December 2020; “The Rise of Illiberal Hegemony–Trump’s Surprising Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018; “It’s Time to Make Afghanistan Someone Else’s Problem,” The Atlantic, 2017; “Contain ISIS,” The Atlantic, 2015, “Pull Back: The Case for a Less Activist Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013; and “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, Summer, 2003. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016 he was appointed Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center. He is the 2017 recipient of the International Security Studies Section (ISSS), International Studies Association, Distinguished Scholar Award, and in 2019 received the Notre Dame International Security Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; and a Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.

Patricia M. Kim is a fellow at Brookings and holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for Asia Policy Studies. She is an expert on Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and the politics and security of East Asia. At Brookings, she co-leads the Global China Project and the Brookings-CSIS Project on Advancing Collaboration in an Era of Strategic Competition.

Previously, Kim served as a senior China specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she directed a project on U.S.-China strategic stability and served as the principal investigator for a major report on China’s growing footprint in Africa and the Middle East. She was also a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, International Security Program Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University.

Kim’s writing and analysis have been widely featured in prominent journals and media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She frequently briefs U.S. government officials in her areas of expertise and has testified before the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade.

Kim received her doctoral degree from the Department of Politics at Princeton University and her bachelor’s degree with highest distinction in political science and Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and proficient in Japanese. Kim is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Oliver Stuenkel is a senior fellow affiliated with the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also a Fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School and an associate professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil. 

His research focuses on geopolitics and the global order, emerging powers, Brazilian foreign policy and Latin American politics and democracy. He is the author of several books on geopolitics, including The BRICS and the Future of Global Order and The Post-Western World, which have been translated into multiple languages. He is also a columnist for Foreign Policy and O Estado de S. Paulo, a commentator on Brazilian television and radio, and one of Latin America’s leading foreign policy analysts. 

His articles have been published in major international relations journals, including International Affairs, Global Governance, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Global R2P, and Conflict, Security and Development. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Financial Times, Global Times, Mail & Guardian, Times of India, The Hindu, Folha de S. Paulo, Valor Econômico, and O Globo. From 2016 to 2021, he was a columnist for El País. 

He has been a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, and the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) in Rome. Oliver holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Valencia in Spain, a master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Oliver speaks Portuguese, Spanish, English, German, and French. He lives in Washington, DC.