Thomas J. Wright Keynote Speaker

Dr. Thomas J. Wright served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council from 2022-2025. He is now a senior fellow at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution.

At the White House, Tom worked closely with the U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on a wide range of issues, including the Russia-Ukraine war, U.S.-China relations, artificial intelligence, developing a new approach for foreign economic policy, and countering the growing alignment between U.S. adversaries and competitors (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea). Tom was the principal drafter of the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy which focused on strategic competition in an interdependent world and of the 2024 National Security Memorandum on adversarial alignment.

Tom is the author of “All Measures Short of War: The Contest For the 21st Century and the Future of American Power” (Yale University Press, 2017) which was a seminal text on interdependent competition between great powers. He has also written extensively for The Atlantic as a contributing writer and for many other publications. These pieces included a Politico Magazine essay in January 2016 that was the first to identify Donald Trump’s America First worldview, months before Trump himself coined the term.

Tom has a doctorate from Georgetown University, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge University, and a bachelor’s and master’s from University College Dublin. He has also held a pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University.

He was previously executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School for Public Policy.