Brussels Forum Session: Partnership Disrupted: How Can Transatlantic Cooperation Endure?
Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III distinguished fellow in strategy and statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Alexander Hamilton professor of strategy and statecraft with the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, and the “Global View” columnist at The Wall Street Journal. From 1997 to 2010, he was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, serving as the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy from 2003 until his departure.
Mead is the author of “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World”, which received the Lionel Gelber Award for best book in English on international relations in 2002, among other honors and prizes. In 2012, the Foreign Policy Research Institute awarded him its Benjamin Franklin Prize for his work in the field of American foreign policy.
Mead’s book, “God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World”, is a major study of 400 years of conflict between Anglophone powers and rivals. The Washington Post and the Economist listed it as one of the best books of the year. His most recent book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, is a history of the US-Israel relationship that examines the origins of American support for Israel and the relationship’s impact on past, present, and future US policy.
Mead has contributed to a wide variety of leading American journals and frequently appears on national and international radio and television programs. He is an honors graduate of Groton and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and his translation of New Testament Greek. He is a founding board member of New America and serves on the board of Aspenia, an Aspen Italy publication.
Brussels Forum Session: Disruptions to Transatlantic Energy Security and Competitiveness
Wally Adeyemo served as the 15th deputy secretary of the US Department of the Treasury and chief operating officer of the agency during the Biden administration. He led the department’s national security and economic inequality work, and implemented some of its top policy priorities.
Adeyemo oversaw the department's use of financial sanctions and the work of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. He led the department's review of the effectiveness of sanctions as a national security tool and was the primary driver of the administration’s approach to considering the national security implications of foreign direct investment. He also managed Treasury’s implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and the most significant effort in decades to modernize the Internal Revenue Service.
Prior to his appointment, Adeyemo served as president of the Barack Obama Foundation and, in the Obama administration, as deputy national security adviser for international economics and deputy director of the National Economic Council at the White House.
Adeyemo is a distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Global Politics and Center for Global Energy Policy. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. He was previously a board member of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on social, political, and economic equity issues, and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and at Blackrock.
Brussels Forum Session: The Middle East: Crisis and Opportunity at a Time of Global Disruption
Vali Nasr is the Majid Khadduri professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studes (SAIS), and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He previously served as SAIS dean and as senior adviser to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Nasr is the author of several books including “Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History”, “How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare”, “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat”, “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future”, and “Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty”. He has also written articles and commentary for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He is the recipient of a Carnegie Scholar Award and fellowships from The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He was selected as the Henry Alfred Kissinger resident scholar at the Library of Congress for 2024-25.