U.S. foreign policy isn’t just hashed out in Washington, D.C. or New York City.
It’s being shaped and made right here in the Boston area. Generals, diplomats, and other top government officials often take teaching posts in some of the estimated 50 local institutions of higher learning after their terms of public service are concluded, educating the next generation of foreign policy leaders. And some of the public intellectuals who have influenced U.S. foreign policy call the Hub home. In the below slides are some of the most important top foreign policy influencers in the Boston area.
Note: There is no formal ranking of influence or order of importance to the below list. The list is meant to be representative, not exhaustive. Information is taken from official institutional and government biographies, as well as other publicly available sources, including media reports.
U.S. Secretary of Defense
Ashton B. Carter
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Serving as Secretary of Defense is about as influential as it gets on foreign policy (other than Secretary of State). Carter took office in February 2015, replacing Chuck Hagel. He had previously also served as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2013. He also served in the Clinton administration. Carter studied medieval history at Yale as an undergraduate and later received his doctorate in theoretical physics at Oxford. He started teaching at Harvard in the mid-1980s and later became the director of what is now the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where the Kennedy School’s experts in international relations are located. Although he is obviously not working there now, he still maintains an affiliation with the school: his profile page states that he is currently “on leave.”
Bush’s General
David Petraeus
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Yes, this is that David Petraeus—the one who led the surge in Iraq and later served as head of the CIA until he was forced to resign after an affair with his biographer, with whom he was also accused of sharing classified information. He also briefly served as commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2011. Petraeus is generally credited with the developing the strategy behind the counter-insurgency—and changing in the process how the U.S. military will fight future wars. His 242-page manual on how to fight an insurgency is still online, available here.
Obama’s General
James Cartwright
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: General James Cartwright served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011—the second highest ranking position in the military. Cartwright, who got his start as a pilot in the U.S. Marines and rose to the rank of four-star general, became known as “Obama’s favorite general” and is generally credited with developing the strategy for drawing down U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The Accidental Admiral
James Stavridis
Local Affiliation: Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
Importance: In an age of resume-padding, very few people can put “Supreme Allied Commander” as one of their past jobs. That’s the position retired U.S. Admiral James Stavridis held with NATO from 2009 to 2013. In the current election cycle, Stavridis’ name was floated as a possible vice presidential pick for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Stavridis brushed off the talk, telling Politico his name was “too long to fit on a bumper sticker.” In his biography, The Accidental Admiral, Stavridis has described his rise in the U.S. Navy as something of an “accident,” writing that after his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy he had planned to serve the minimum five years before exploring a career in law. He serves as the dean at of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.
World Banker
Robert Zoellick
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: A former deputy Secretary of State under the first President George Bush, Zoellick went on to serve as president of the World Bank for five years, where is he credited with bringing more accountability and transparency to the global institution and expanding assistance to poorer countries. Prior to his tenure at the World Bank he held several positions at Goldman Sachs. During the 2012 campaign, he was an adviser to the Romney campaign. That year, Foreign Policy magazine has ranked him as the seventh most influential Republican in the country on foreign policy.
Real-life Top Gun
James Winnefeld
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Prior to becoming a senior fellow at the Belfer Center, Winnefeld served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2011 to 2015—the second highest ranking military officer in the nation. Winnefeld spent most of his career in the U.S. Navy. He started out flying the F-14 Tomcat and teaching at the Navy Fighter Weapons School, which is actually nicknamed Topgun. He also was an aide to General Colin Powell. He went on to command the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, during the immediate response to the September 11 attacks. He later became the commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), among many other top command positions, according to his official biography.
Speak Softly
Joseph Nye
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Joseph Nye is a longtime leading theorist of international relations. He is famous for his theory of “soft” power—the idea that the attractiveness of a country’s culture and values can influence others. This is contrast to “hard” power, which is coercive, such as the use of military force or economic sanctions. As Nye put it in a recent article, “Power is the ability to alter the behavior of others to get what you want. There are basically three ways to do that: coercion (sticks), payments (carrots), and attraction (soft power).” He has subsequently developed his theory further, advocating for “smart power”—the effective use of both “hard” and “soft” power.
Terrorism Whistleblower
Richard Clarke
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: If his name doesn’t ring a bell or his face doesn’t look familiar, you didn’t watch any news during the middle years of the Bush administration. In 2004, Clark, formerly the national counter-terrorism chief, made a splash in the news with his explosive accusations that the Bush administration had ignored his warnings about the threat al Qaeda posed before September 11 and that after the terrorist attacks had been too focused on the potential role of Saddam Hussein. Clarke became a regular fixture of television talk programs. He now is an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government.
Spook to Scholar
Michael Morell
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: A longtime CIA insider, Morell was President Bush’s daily CIA briefer in 2001 and was with him on September 11. He is known for his daily brief in August 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” He capped off a 33-year career at the CIA by serving as its deputy director and twice as acting director under President Obama, during his first term and into the first year of his second. He was also at Obama’s side when bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces. As the publisher of his 2015 book about his time in the CIA puts it, “From the subway bombings in London to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Morell always seemed to find himself on the cusp of history.”
Colossal Thinker
Niall Ferguson
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Niall Ferguson is a British historian and public intellectual who is known for his unorthodox views. In his 2004 book, Colossus, Ferguson argued that the United States is not only an empire, as Great Britain once was, but also he argued that Americans must be more aggressive in embracing their imperialist responsibilities. In 2004, TIME magazine named him one of the top 100 most influential people in the world. Although he spends most of his time now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University he is still connected to the Belfer Center at the Kennedy School, where he is currently working with the center’s director in launching an initiative aimed at getting the next U.S. President to launch a White House Council of Historical Advisers.
The Negotiator
Nick Burns
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Chances are, if there was a major diplomatic deal going down in the early 2000s, Burns was involved. Mostly notably he was a negotiator who represented the Bush administration on nuclear arms negotiations with Iran and has helped promote the current deal with Iran. He also was behind a major $30 billion foreign aid agreement with Israel while serving in the Bush administration. When he retired from the State Department in 2008, he was its highest ranking career diplomat, according to the Belfer Center.
History Maker
Thomas Donilon
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Donilon is the former National Security Adviser to President Obama and was present in the Situation Room when bin Laden was killed. He was also a key foreign policy official in the Clinton years and was involved in the peace agreement in Bosnia, the Middle East peace process, and the expansion of NATO. In between his years of government service, he was a lobbyist for Fannie Mae.
Counter Terror to Teacher
Michele Malvesti
Local Affiliation: Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
Importance: After September 11, there are many unsung heroes in the military and intelligence community who deserve our gratitude for playing a direct role in preventing another terrorist attack. Michele Malvesti is one of them. She joined the staff of the National Security Council—a White House agency—in 2002 and later became the Senior Director for Combating Terrorism Strategy. She served on the council until 2007. In 2009, she co-chaired a group that spearheaded the organization of all White House staffers who deal with homeland security and counter-terrorism issues. She also previously worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency. She now is Professor of Practice in International Security Studies at Fletcher.
Pakistan to Pardee
Adil Najam
Local Affiliation: Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University
Importance: He may not exactly be a household name in the United States, let alone Boston, but Adil Najam is an internationally regarded expert on Southeast Asian issues and development who got his start in his native Pakistan. Locally, he has an opportunity to shape the next generation of foreign policy leaders as the inaugural dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, which was established two years ago. Prior to his arrival at Pardee, he already had a resume studded with achievement. He was a member of a panel of scientists that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its work on climate change. In 2008, he was appointed to the UN Committee on Development, and from 2011-13 he was vice chancellor at Lahore University of Management Sciences.
Shoe-leather Scholar
Augustus Richard Norton
Local Affiliation: Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University
Importance: Norton is a top U.S. expert on the Middle East who has written extensively on such topics as Hezbollah, the Palestinian Liberation Army, and reformist Islam. He is fluent in Arabic and at least one of his books has been published in that language. In the 1990s, he led a highly respected three-year study of civil society in the Middle East. In 2006, he was an adviser to the Iraq Study Group, also known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission. He has previously taught at West Point. Norton is no armchair intellectual—much of his study is based on field work done over the past three decades in about half a dozen countries.
Nation Builder
Meghan L. O’Sullivan
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: A former top national security adviser in the Bush administration, O’Sullivan was involved in the reconstruction of Iraq and helped orchestrate the strategy behind the surge. In 2008, Esquire named her “one of the most influential people of the century,” according to her official biography. “She has—by the ripe old age of 39—racked up more history-making national-security policy stints than anyone under 40 you can name,” Esquire wrote in its profile, concluding that O’Sullivan is “both celebrated and vilified, but clearly credentialed.” At the Kennedy School she is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs. She also is an adviser to the Hess Corporation.
Global Nomad
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and fled to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage. She later became a member of the Dutch parliament and collaborated on a film critical of Islam and its treatment of women. Her collaborator on the project was Theo van Gogh, whose great-grandfather was the brother of Vincent van Gogh. The backlash against the film led to Theo van Gogh’s murder and death threats against Hirsi Ali. She came to the United States after a controversy over her Dutch citizenship. Her journey from fundamentalist Islam to America is chronicled in two books, Infidel and Nomad. She is known for her outspoken views of fundamentalist Islam. Like her husband, Niall Ferguson, she was once named a TIME top 100 influential person and holds positions at the Hoover Institution in Stanford and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Cyber Guru
Bruce Schneier
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: Dubbed the “security guru” by The Economist, Schneier advises IBM on cyber-security issues and has written extensively on the topic, including the New York Times best-seller, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. His newsletter, Crypto-Gram, and blog reach 250,000 regular readers, according to his official biography.
Scholar Blogger
Daniel Drezner
Local Affiliation: Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
Importance: Drezner is one of those rare scholars who toils away deep in the bowels of academia but also manages to write for broad public audiences as well. His list of books includes a number of academic-sounding titles along with ones like this: Theories of International Politics and Zombies, which uses the hypothetical scenario of a zombie apocalypse to explain the various theories of international relations. In the blogosphere, he once maintained a highly respected blog for Foreign Policy magazine and now writes the Spoiler Alerts blog for the Washington Post.
Global Crusader
Paula Dobriansky
Local Affiliation: Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
Importance: As Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs under President Bush, the issues that Dobriansky dealt with are about as big as they get: representing the United States on climate change issues, protecting human rights, and promoting democracy. She also had a role in setting U.S. policy on two hot spots in global affairs: Northern Ireland and Tibet. During the 2012 election, she advised Mitt Romney on foreign policy issues and was ranked that year as one of the most influential Republicans on international relations by Foreign Policy magazine.
(AP photo) 
