David F. Gordon is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He is also an adjunct professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Mr. Gordon is a highly decorated former diplomat and intelligence officer. He served as Director of Policy Planning for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after having played a leading role in the creation of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) as the head of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Earlier in his career he served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee staff. After leaving government service, Gordon was the Chairman and Head of Research at Eurasia Group, the global political risk advisory firm.
During his career in government, Mr. Gordon worked to deepen strategic insight and policy options at the interface of international economics, diplomacy and geopolitics. He led the State Department’s and the NIC’s strategic dialogues with more than 20 countries around the globe and was a principal in the Senior Dialogue with China. Mr. Gordon oversaw the NIC’s groundbreaking reports, Global Trends 2015 and 2020; and, after 9/11, played a leading role in the development of strategies and tools of financial coercion. For ten years, Mr. Gordon represented the intelligence community on the White House coordinating committee on international economic policy. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he was frequently called upon to brief congressional committees on the status of these conflicts. He has personally briefed every US president since George H. W. Bush.
Since leaving government, Mr. Gordon has been a frequent contributor to discussions of global politics and international economics on television and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. His latest book is Managing Strategic Surprise: Lessons from risk Management and Risk Assessment. Mr. Gordon was awarded the CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal in 2009; and, in 2011, was the recipient of Bowdoin College’s highest alumni honor, the Common Good Award. He received his Ph.D from the University of Michigan.