Charles A. Kupchan and Ely Ratner Join CFR as Senior Fellows

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) welcomes two experts on national security, Charles A. Kupchan and Ely Ratner, to its David Rockefeller Studies Program.

Charles A. Kupchan has returned to CFR as a senior fellow after serving as special assistant for national security affairs to President Barack Obama and senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council from 2014 to 2017. His research will focus on U.S. grand strategy, European affairs, and transatlantic relations and he will direct a roundtable series on transatlantic and European issues.

Kupchan is also professor of international affairs in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the government department at Georgetown University. He previously served on the National Security Council as director for European affairs during the Bill Clinton administration. Before that, he worked in the U.S. Department of State on the Policy Planning Staff and at Princeton University as an assistant professor.

Kupchan is the author of numerous books on international and strategic affairs—most recently No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn and How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace. From 2013 to 2014, he was a senior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy, and from 2006 to 2007, he was the Henry A. Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He received a BA from Harvard University and MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University.

Ely Ratner will join CFR on February 21 as the Maurice R. Greenberg senior fellow in China studies. His work will focus on China and regional security in Asia.

From 2015 to 2017, Ratner served as the deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, focusing primarily on Asia and China policy within his global portfolio. From 2011 to 2012, while a CFR international affairs fellow, he served on the China desk at the State Department. He also previously worked in the U.S. Senate on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in the office of Senator Biden.

Outside of government, Ratner has worked as a senior fellow and deputy director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and as an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He received his BA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. 

To interview Kupchan or Ratner, please contact the Global Communications and Media Relations team at 212.434.9888 or [email protected].