Atlantic Council

Biography

Robert Hunter

Robert E. Hunter is a member of the executive committee of the Atlantic Council Board of Directors and sits on the Strategic Advisors Group.

He is a Senior Adviser at the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C., and is a former President of the Atlantic Treaty Association and Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

From July 1993 to January 1998, he served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO, and also represented the U.S. to the Western European Union. He was a principal architect of the "New NATO" and a key leader on the North Atlantic Council in implementing decisions of the 1994 and 1997 NATO Summits. These include NATO enlargement, NATO-Russia and NATO-Ukraine relations, NATO-WEU relations, NATO's internal restructuring, and the Partnership for Peace (PfP) -- of which he is co-author. Ambassador Hunter led the Council in obtaining decisions for nine air-strikes on Bosnia, and secured NATO approval for both the Implementation Force (IFOR) and the Stabilization Force (SFOR). He was twice recipient of the Pentagon's highest civilian decoration, the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, from Secretaries Perry and Cohen.

Prior to his appointment to NATO, Ambassador Hunter was Vice President for International Politics and Director of European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. During 1981-93, he also served (1983-84) as Special Adviser on Lebanon to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and Lead Consultant to the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (the Kissinger Commission). He was co-founder of the Center for National Policy and an organizer of the National Endowment for Democracy. In the 1992 presidential campaign, he was a Senior Foreign Policy Adviser to Governor Bill Clinton, and he performed a similar role for Vice President Walter Mondale (1981-84) and Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (1988).

Throughout the Carter Administration, Ambassador Hunter served on the National Security Council staff, as Director of West European Affairs (1977-79) and then as Director of Middle East Affairs (1979-81). He was also a member of the U.S. negotiating team for talks on the West Bank and Gaza, directed the 1978 NATO Summit, and was a principal author of the Carter Doctrine for the Persian Gulf. Earlier, he was Foreign Policy Adviser to Senator Edward M. Kennedy (1973-77), Senior Fellow at the Overseas Development Council (1970-73), Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London (1967, 1968-69), and foreign and domestic policy adviser to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. He served on the White House staff (health, education, welfare, labor) in the Johnson Administration (1964-65) and in the Navy Department on the Polaris Project.

Ambassador Hunter was educated at Wesleyan University (BA - 1962, Phi Beta Kappa) and the London School of Economics (PhD in International Relations - 1969, Fulbright Scholar). He has taught at the LSE (1966-69), Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Washington College (Louis L. Goldstein Chair in Public Policy - 1989). He has served on the boards of the Atlantic Council, Wesleyan University (currently emeritus), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, and the National Association for the Southern Poor.

Among his many publications (more than 700), Ambassador Hunter is author of Security in Europe, Presidential Control of Foreign Policy, NATO: The Next Generation (editor), Grand Strategy for the West (co-editor), The Soviet Dilemma in the Middle East, and Organizing for National Security. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, and many other journals; plus chapters in books and op-ed articles in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other newspapers (425 articles from 1981-93). He has played a national policy role in eight U.S. presidential election campaigns and been a leading speech writer for U.S. Presidents and others for 30 years.