Brett McGurk

Brett McGurk is a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security served as Deputy Assistant to President Biden and White House Coordinator for the Middle East region. In this role, he spearheaded responses to some of the most complex diplomatic challenges of our time–from helping lead multi-month negotiations across the region to secure the release of Israeli hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza, to coordinating Israel’s defense against the largest ballistic missile attacks in history, and to overseeing all aspects of American engagement throughout the Middle East and North Africa at moments of acute crisis and opportunity.

Throughout his career, McGurk has been at the forefront of modern diplomacy’s evolution–from championing new technology and energy corridors between India, the Gulf states, Israel, Jordan, and Europe, to witnessing firsthand how AI and computing infrastructure have become essential to maintaining strategic partnerships and global influence. He also has a first-hand understanding of how breakthrough defense technologies employed by US military forces can deter future conflicts, provided the United States maintains its leading technological edge.

As Special Presidential Envoy for both Obama and Trump, McGurk built and then led a global coalition of more than eighty countries together with local forces on the ground to defeat ISIS and prevent future attacks into Europe as well as our own homeland. He also led secret negotiations with Iran to secure the release of American hostages, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaein, later receiving the James Foley Freedom Award for hostage diplomacy. As a senior White House official under George W. Bush, Brett was an early advocate for a change in war policy and helped develop “the surge” to better align the ends and means of US strategy.

During a brief period out of government service in 2019 and 2020, McGurk taught graduate courses on strategy and presidential decision-making at Stanford, and served on the board of a Lux company, Primer, which harnesses AI and natural language processing for real-time analysis in crisis and operational environments.