Ely Ratner

Ely Ratner is a principal at The Marathon Initiative and senior adviser at Clarion Strategies. He served as assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs from 2021 to 2025 and as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017. He has also worked in the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs at the State Department and in the U.S. Senate as a professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Outside of government, Ratner has worked as the executive vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, as a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and as an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He received his B.A. from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California Berkeley.