Mary Kissel

Mary Kissel is a senior executive and foreign policy expert with more than two decades of experience advising political leaders, CEOs, and institutional investors on geopolitics, markets, and strategy. She is founder and CEO of The Kissel Group, a strategic advisory firm, and a nonresident senior fellow at Hudson Institute. Her work at Hudson focuses on United States foreign policy, alliances, and the intersection of politics, business, and finance. She is vice chairman of RXO, Inc. and serves as a director of Cadre Holdings, Inc., HEYCO Energy Group, Inc., and QXO, Inc. 

Ms. Kissel founded and led the policy advisory practice for Stephens, Inc., a privately held financial services firm, counseling clients in the US, United Kingdom, and Europe on geopolitical risk. From 2018 to 2021, Ms. Kissel was Senior Adviser to the US Secretary of State, Michael R. Pompeo, where she advised the secretary on major foreign policy initiatives, led high-priority projects across the department, and represented the US in more than 60 countries and in multilateral fora. She was instrumental in the reorientation of US-China relations and the 2021 genocide designation against the Chinese Communist Party.  

Ms. Kissel spent 14 years on the Wall Street Journal editorial board in New York and as editorial page editor for Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong. In Asia, her profiles of prominent figures such as the Dalai Lama and the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, along with early warnings about China’s rapid military buildup, established her as a leading voice on Asian affairs. From 2017 to 2018, she was a Fox News contributor and hosted the Journal’s Foreign Edition podcast. She began her career at Goldman Sachs in New York and London. 

Ms. Kissel is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a director of the American Australian Council. She appears on television, radio programs, and podcasts around the world, and her work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and The Spectator. Ms. Kissel is a graduate of Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. In May 2026, she received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Northwood University, “America’s Free-Enterprise University,” in Midland, Michigan.