Rebecca Lissner

Rebecca Lissner is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy and lecturer with the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. She is a leading scholar of American grand strategy who has served in senior national security and foreign policy roles in the White House.

Lissner most recently served as deputy assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser to the vice president in the Biden-Harris administration. In that role, she counseled Vice President Kamala Harris and senior White House leadership on the full range of national security and foreign policy matters, such as U.S.-China competition, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and artificial intelligence, defense and climate policy.

Before her service at the White House, Lissner was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, where her research focused on American grand strategy. She is the author of two books: “Wars of Revelation: The Transformative Effects of Military Intervention on Grand Strategy” and “An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order” (co-authored with Mira Rapp-Hooper). She holds an A.B. in social studies from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University.