At A Glance:

Tod Lindberg is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute specializing in national security issues and the role of US leadership.

Biography

Tod Lindberg is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute specializing in national security issues and the role of US leadership. He writes widely on US foreign policy and national security, as well as on American politics and philosophical topics.

Mr. Lindberg is the author of The Heroic Heart: Greatness Ancient and Modern, a philosophical investigation of changing ideas about heroism and its connection to political order and change, and The Political Teachings of Jesus, a study of Jesus’s Gospel teaching about worldly affairs. He is co-author with Lee Feinstein of Means to an End: US Interest in the International Criminal Court . He is the editor of Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership and co-editor with Derek Chollet and David Shorr of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide .

Mr. Lindberg's main policy focus in recent years has been on improving US government policies and processes as well as international cooperation for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities. He served as lead of the expert group on international norms and institutions of the 2008 Genocide Prevention Task Force convened by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. He also served as coordinator for the task group on Preventing and Responding to Genocide and Major Human Rights Abuses for the United States Institute of Peace’s 2005 Task Force on the United Nations (the Gingrich-Mitchell task force). He is a member of the Experts Committee on Preventing Mass Violence, whose final report, A Necessary Good: US Leadership on Preventing Mass Atrocities, was published in December 2016. With his long-time collaborator Lee A. Feinstein, he is author of Allies Against Atrocities: The Imperative for Transatlantic Cooperation to Prevent and Stop Mass Killings, a major report for the Holocaust Museum whose principal recommendations the American Bar Association endorsed without dissent at its February 2017 meeting; he has been named co-chair (with Raymond Brown) of the ABA’s new Atrocity Prevention and Response Project. He is also a member of its Working Group on Crimes Against Humanity. In 2017, he joined the Holocaust Museum’s Committee on Conscience, the oversight body for the Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide.

Mr. Lindberg has written for scholarly and  popular publications from Telos and the Review of Metaphysics to Foreign Affairs and Commentary to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He is adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a graduate seminar on ethics and decision-making in international politics.

From 1999 until 2013, he was editor of the acclaimed bimonthly Policy Review. From 2001 to 2017, he was a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He established Hoover’s Washington, D.C. office in 2001. Previously, he served in senior editorial positions at the Washington Times and was the founding executive editor of the National Interest and an editor at the Public Interest.

He has participated in numerous policy study groups, most recently a RAND study commissioned by the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment on the future of global order, for which he drafted a working paper on “Global Order and Liberal Overreach.” He contributed a chapter on victims’ rights and the International Criminal Court to Mark Lagon and Anthony Arend, editors, Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions (Georgetown University Press) and a chapter on “What is the ‘International Community’?” to Chester A. Crocker, Fenn Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, editors, Managing Conflict in a World Adrift (U.S. Institute of Peace). In modified form, it also appeared as a Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, “Making Sense of the ‘International Community.’” He was principal author of a working paper of the German Marshall Fund of the United States on “Next-Step Pressure Points and Democracy Promotion.” He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Princeton Project on National Security and co-chair of its Working Group on Anti-Americanism. He contributed the lead chapter, “The Case Against the Case Against Europe,” in Simon Serfaty, editor, Visions of the Atlantic Alliance: The United States, the European Union, and NATO (Center for Strategic and International Studies). His article co-authored with Derek Chollet, “A Moral Core for US Foreign Policy,” has been anthologized in G. John Ikenberry, editor, American Foreign Policy: Theoretical Essays (Wadsworth/Cengage Learning). He has spoken at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Virginia, Indiana, and Texas among other colleges and universities.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Advisory Council of the Stanley Foundation, the Advisory Board of the Chicago Council Survey, and the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. He served two terms as an appointee of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the US National Commission for UNESCO. He was an advisor on national security to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

He studied political philosophy and literature at the University of Chicago with Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow, among others. Commentary published his long poem, “The Apology of Patroclus,” a dramatic monologue, in its October 2016 edition. He and his wife Tina live in Washington, DC They have two grown daughters.

Events
21
February 2023
Past Event
Lessons of Ukraine for the Role of Values in Foreign Policy
Featured Speakers:
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
Richard Fontaine
Ash Jain
Tod Lindberg
The Ukrainian flag flutters between buildings destroyed in bombardment in Borodianka, Ukraine, on April 17, 2022. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
21
February 2023
Past Event
Lessons of Ukraine for the Role of Values in Foreign Policy

Senior Fellow Tod Lindberg hosts a distinguished panel of experts to discuss the role of moral considerations in US foreign policy.

The Ukrainian flag flutters between buildings destroyed in bombardment in Borodianka, Ukraine, on April 17, 2022. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Featured Speakers:
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca
Richard Fontaine
Ash Jain
Tod Lindberg
05
April 2021
Past Event
Virtual Event | A Pandemic of Deception: COVID-19 and Disinformation Operations
Featured Speakers:
Sarah J. Gamberini
Aurimas Piečiukaitis
Richard Weitz
Tod Lindberg
05
April 2021
Past Event
Virtual Event | A Pandemic of Deception: COVID-19 and Disinformation Operations

Please be advised: This event will premiere LIVE on this page at 12:00 p.m. EDT, Monday, April 5.

Join Hudson Institute Senior Fellows Tod Lindberg a

Featured Speakers:
Sarah J. Gamberini
Aurimas Piečiukaitis
Richard Weitz
Tod Lindberg
30
November 2020
Past Event
Livestream | The Origin and Future of the China Challenge: A Conversation with Peter Berkowitz
Featured Speakers:
Peter Berkowitz
Tod Lindberg
30
November 2020
Past Event
Livestream | The Origin and Future of the China Challenge: A Conversation with Peter Berkowitz

The State Department's Office of Policy Planning has just released its much anticipated comprehensive assessment of the challenge China now poses to

Featured Speakers:
Peter Berkowitz
Tod Lindberg
27
August 2020
Past Event
Video Event | The Future of Belarus: Fraud or Freedom?
Featured Speakers:
Natalia Kaliada
Franak Viačorka
Tod Lindberg
27
August 2020
Past Event
Video Event | The Future of Belarus: Fraud or Freedom?

Please be advised: This event will premiere on this page at 12:00 p.m. EDT, Thursday, August 27.

Protesters took to the streets en masse in Belarus

Featured Speakers:
Natalia Kaliada
Franak Viačorka
Tod Lindberg
People with a chisel and sledgehammer participate in the destruction of the Berlin Wall near by the Brandenburg Gate as they celebrate the first New Year in a unified Berlin since World War II on December 31, 1989, in Berlin, Germany. (Thierry Monasse via Getty Images)
Caption
People with a chisel and sledgehammer participate in the destruction of the Berlin Wall near by the Brandenburg Gate as they celebrate the first New Year in a unified Berlin since World War II on December 31, 1989, in Berlin, Germany. (Thierry Monasse via Getty Images)
tod_lindberg
tod_lindberg
Senior Fellow
Commentary
9 Min Read
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev pose for a group photo with other leaders at the Third Belt and Road Forum on October 18, 2023, in Beijing, China. (Suo Takekuma/Pool via Getty Images)
Caption
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev pose for a group photo with other leaders at the Third Belt and Road Forum on October 18, 2023, in Beijing, China. (Suo Takekuma/Pool via Getty Images)
tod_lindberg
tod_lindberg
Senior Fellow
Commentary
10 Min Read
A Protester is seen holding up a US Flag in Hong Kong on September 8, 2019, Protester march from Charter Garden to the US Consulate in Hong Kong calling for support. (Photo by Vernon Yuen via Getty Images)
Caption
A Protester is seen holding up a US Flag in Hong Kong on September 8, 2019, Protester march from Charter Garden to the US Consulate in Hong Kong calling for support. (Photo by Vernon Yuen via Getty Images)
tod_lindberg
tod_lindberg
Senior Fellow
Commentary
4 Min Read