Rajan Menon

Rajan Menon is a nonresident scholar in the Russia and Eurasia Program and director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities. He holds the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York/City University of New York and is a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University.

He has been a fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs and the New America Foundation, academic fellow at the Carnegie Corporation, research scholar at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His books include Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986), The End of Alliances (Oxford University Press, 2007), Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, coauthored with Eugene Rumer (MIT Press, 2015), and The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2016). His next book, Russia After Putin, coauthored with Eugene B. Rumer, is under contract to Oxford University Press.

In addition to publications in numerous academic journals, Menon has written for Foreign Affairs, the Boston Review, Foreign Policy, National Interest, the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Financial Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, US News & World Report, CNN, the Nation, and the Washington Post. He has appeared as a commentator on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, NPR, France 24 Television, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Radio Australia.  

In 1989-90, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, he served as special assistant for national security (focusing on arms control) on the staff of Representative Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY), chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia-Pacific Subcommittee.