In this edition of IIEA Insights two former foreign policy advisors – Ben Judah in the UK and Thomas Wright in the US – will recount their respective experiences of policy formulation, including the roles of advisors, civil servants, and political leaders, and how those roles have changed over time, if at all. They will also give personal views on the current state of play in some of the major issues that they were involved in as foreign policy advisors.
 
Ben Judah worked as Special Advisor to British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, from February 2024 until early 2026. He is an author, publishing most recently This is Europe in 2023 and has held a number of think tank positions. From 2020 to 2024, he was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, in Washington, D.C.,where he directed the Transform Europe Initiative.  From 2017 to 2020, he held a research fellowship at the Hudson Institute, also in Washington, D.C., where he led research for the Kleptocracy Initiative. And from 2010 to 2012, he was a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London.
 
Thomas Wright is a Senior Fellow at Brookings’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology and previously served as special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council in the Biden administration. At the White House, he worked on the 2022 US National Security Strategy, Russia-Ukraine and European security, US-China relations, foreign economic policy, and adversary alignment. He is the author of All Measures Short of War and co-author of Aftershocks. He holds degrees from Georgetown, Cambridge, and University College Dublin, and has held fellowships at Harvard and Princeton.