Tod Lindberg

Tod Lindberg is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute specializing in national security issues and the role of US leadership. He writes widely on US foreign policy and national security, as well as on American politics and philosophical topics.

Mr. Lindberg is the author of The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern, a philosophical investigation of changing ideas about heroism and its connection to political order and change, and The Political Teachings of Jesus, a study of Jesus’s Gospel teaching about worldly affairs. He is co-author with Lee Feinstein of Means to an End: US Interest in the International Criminal Court . He is the editor of Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership and co-editor with Derek Chollet and David Shorr of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide .

Mr. Lindberg's main policy focus in recent years has been on improving US government policies and processes as well as international cooperation for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. He served as lead of the expert group on international norms and institutions of the 2008 Genocide Prevention Task Force convened by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. He also served as coordinator for the task group on Preventing and Responding to Genocide and Major Human Rights Abuses for the United States Institute of Peace’s 2005 Task Force on the United Nations (the Gingrich-Mitchell task force). He is a member of the Experts Committee on Preventing Mass Violence, whose final report, A Necessary Good: US Leadership on Preventing Mass Atrocities, was published in December 2016. With his long-time collaborator Lee A. Feinstein, he is author of Allies Against Atrocities: The Imperative for Transatlantic Cooperation to Prevent and Stop Mass Killings, a major report for the Holocaust Museum whose principal recommendations the American Bar Association endorsed without dissent at its February 2017 meeting; he has been named co-chair (with Raymond Brown) of the ABA’s new Atrocity Prevention and Response Project. He is also a member of its Working Group on Crimes Against Humanity. In 2017, he joined the Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience, the oversight body for the Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

Mr. Lindberg has written for scholarly and  popular publications from Telos and the Review of Metaphysics to Foreign Affairs and Commentary to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He is adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a graduate seminar on ethics and decision-making in international politics.

From 1999 until 2013, he was editor of the acclaimed bimonthly Policy Review. From 2001 to 2017, he was a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He established Hoover’s Washington, D.C. office in 2001. Previously, he served in senior editorial positions at the Washington Times and was the founding executive editor of the National Interest and an editor at the Public Interest.

He has participated in numerous policy study groups, most recently a RAND study commissioned by the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment on the future of global order, for which he drafted a working paper on “Global Order and Liberal Overreach.” He contributed a chapter on victims’ rights and the International Criminal Court to Mark Lagon and Anthony Arend, editors, Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions (Georgetown University Press) and a chapter on “What is the ‘International Community’?” to Chester A. Crocker, Fenn Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, editors, Managing Conflict in a World Adrift (U.S. Institute of Peace). In modified form, it also appeared as a Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, “Making Sense of the ‘International Community.’” He was principal author of a working paper of the German Marshall Fund of the United States on “Next-Step Pressure Points and Democracy Promotion.” He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Princeton Project on National Security and co-chair of its Working Group on Anti-Americanism. He contributed the lead chapter, “The Case Against the Case Against Europe,” in Simon Serfaty, editor, Visions of the Atlantic Alliance: The United States, the European Union, and NATO (Center for Strategic and International Studies). His article co-authored with Derek Chollet, “A Moral Core for US Foreign Policy,” has been anthologized in G. John Ikenberry, editor, American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays (Wadsworth/Cengage Learning). He has spoken at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Virginia, Indiana, and Texas among other colleges and universities.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Advisory Council of the Stanley Foundation, the Advisory Board of the Chicago Council Survey, and the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. He served two terms as an appointee of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the US National Commission for UNESCO. He was an advisor on national security to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

He studied political philosophy and literature at the University of Chicago with Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, among others. Commentary published his long poem, “The Apology of Patroclus,” a dramatic monologue, in its October 2016 edition. He and his wife Tina live in Washington, DC They have two grown daughters.