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Ivo Daalder has been president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs since July 2013. Prior to joining the Council, Daalder served as the Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for more than four years. Daalder also served on the National Security Council staff as director for European Affairs from 1995-97.
 
Ambassador Daalder is a widely-published author. His most recent books include In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Profiles of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents they Served—From JFK to George W. Bush (with I. M. Destler) and the award-winning America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (with James M. Lindsay). Other books include Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World (2007); Crescent of Crisis: US-European Strategy for the Greater Middle East (2006); and Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (2000). Daalder is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the world’s leading newspapers, and a regular commentator on international affairs on television and radio.
 
Before his appointment as ambassador to NATO by President Obama in 2009, Daalder was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, specializing in American foreign policy, European security and transatlantic relations, and national security affairs. Prior to joining Brookings in 1998, he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and director of research at its Center for International and Security Studies.
 
Ambassador Daalder serves on the board of UI LABS, on the leadership board of the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and on the Advisory Committee of the Secretary of State's Strategic Dialogue with Civil Society, for which he also cochairs the Global Cities Working Group.
 
Ambassador Daalder was educated at Oxford and Georgetown Universities, and received his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married to Elisa D. Harris, and they have two sons.