Beth Akers is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. She is an expert on the economics of education, with a particular focus on higher education finance policy.

Her previous work has examined the labor market implications of student loan debt and sought to better understand the costs of federal student lending. She previously held the position of staff economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, where she worked on federal student lending policy as well as other education and labor issues. She received a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from SUNY Albany and has a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and their management, including counterinsurgency, organized crime, and illicit economies. She focuses particularly on South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, and Somalia.

Felbab-Brown is the author of Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (The Brookings Institution Press, 2012) and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings Institution Press, 2009) which examines military conflict and illegal economies in Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, Burma, Northern Ireland, India, and Turkey. Felbab-Brown is also the author of numerous policy reports, academic articles, and opinion pieces. She has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Morocco, India, Nepal, and Sub-Saharan Africa. A frequent commentator in U.S. and international media, Felbab-Brown regularly provides congressional testimony on these issues. She received her Ph.D. in political science from MIT and her B.A. from Harvard University.

Among her publications are: Nuclear and Radiological Attacks by Terrorist Groups (Brookings, forthcoming); Political Violence and the Illicit Economies of West Africa” (Terrorism and Political Violence, 2012); Fighting the Nexus of Organized Crime and Violent Conflict while Enhancing Human Security (US Army War College, 2012); Bringing the State to the Slum: Confronting Organized Crime and Urban Violence in Latin America (Brookings 2011); Calderón’s Caldron: Lessons from Mexico’s Battle Against Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking in Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Michoacán (Brookings, 2011); Afghanistan Ten Years after 9/11: Counterterrorism Accomplishments while a Civil War Is Lurking? (Brookings, 2011) Not as Easy as Falling off a Log: The Illegal Timber Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region and Possible Mitigation Strategies (Brookings, 2011); The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia (Brookings, 2011); Deterring Non-state Actors in U.S. Nuclear and Extended Deterrence: Consideration and Challenges (Brookings, 2010); Why Legalization in Mexico is not a Panacea for Reducing Violence and Suppressing Organized Crime (Brookings, 2010); Negotiations and Reconciliation with the Taliban: Key Policy Issues and Dilemmas (Brookings, 2010); The Political Economy of Illegal Domains in India and China (International Lawyer, Winter 2009); The Drug Economy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Security in the Region (The National Bureau of Asian Research, December 2009); It’s All or Nothing in Afghanistan (The Daily Beast, October 12, 2009); Narco-belligerents Across the Globe: Lessons from Colombia for Afghanistan? (Real Instituto Elcano, October 2009); The Obama Administration’s New Counternarcotics Policy in Afghanistan: Its Promises and Potential Pitfalls (Brookings, 2009); Afghanistan’s Elections and Accountable Governance (The Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2009); Assessment of the Implementation of the United States Government’s Support for Plan Colombia’s Illicit Crops Reduction Components (USAID, 2009) (co-authored); Strengthen Human Security, a chapter from The Fifth Summit of the Americas: Recommendations for Action (Brookings Institution Press, April 2009);

Tracy Gordon is a Fellow in Economic Studies. She is also an affiliated scholar with the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. Her research is in state and local budgeting and public finance, political economy, and urban economics.

Before joining Brookings, Gordon was an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. She was also a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she is now an adjunct fellow. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy with a concurrent M.A. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Gordon has authored reports and journal articles on state and local budgeting, local property taxes, the local initiative process, and so-called "private governments" or common interest developments. Some recent publications include: "The Federal Stimulus Programs and Their Effects," (with Gary Burtless) in The Great Recession, David B. Grusky, Bruce Western, and Christopher Wimer eds. (Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming), "State and Local Fiscal Institutions in Recession and Recovery," in Oxford Handbook on State & Local Government Finance, Robert Ebel and John Petersen eds. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and "State and Local Government Finances: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, and How to Get There," National Tax Association Papers and Proceedings, 2011

Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

She is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Toward an Economy of Well-Being (Brookings, 2011; also published in Chinese and paperback); Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009; published in Chinese, Portuguese and paperback); Happiness and Hardship: Opportunity and Insecurity in New Market Economies (with Stefano Pettinato, Brookings, 2002; also published in Spanish); Private Markets for Public Goods: Raising the Stakes in Economic Reform (Brookings, 1998); Safety Nets, Politics and the Poor: Transitions to Market Economies (Brookings, 1994); Peru's APRA (Lynne Rienner, 1992); Improving the Odds: Political Strategies for Institutional Reform in Latin America (co-author, IDB, 1999); and A Half Penny on the Dollar: The Future of Development Aid, with Michael O'Hanlon (Brookings, 1997). She is the editor, with Eduardo Lora, of Paradox and Perceptions: Quality of Life in Latin America (Brookings, 2009); with Susan Collins, of the Brookings Trade Forum 2004: Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality (Brookings, 2006); and, with Nancy Birdsall, of New Markets, New Opportunities? Economic and Social Mobility in a Changing World (Brookings, 1999), and Beyond Trade-Offs: Market Reforms and Equitable Growth in Latin America (Brookings/IDB, 1988). She is the author of articles in journals including the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the World Bank Research Observer, Health Affairs, Health Economics, the Journal of Socio-Economics, World Economics, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Development Studies, the Journal of Latin American Studies, World Development, the Journal of Happiness Studies, and of numerous chapters in edited volumes, including the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. She is an associate editor at the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and on the editorial boards of numerous other economic journals. She is currently serving on a National Academy of Sciences Panel which is assessing the relevance of well-being metrics for policy.

Graham served as Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at Brookings from 2002-2004. She has also served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. She has also been a consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, and the Harvard Institute for International Development, helping to design safety net programs in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. She has testified in Congress several times on the economic situation in Latin America, and has discussed related topics on NBC News, National Public Radio, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and CNN among others. Graham has also written in the Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times and the Washington Post. Reviews of her work have appeared in Science, The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Financial Times, among others.

Her research has received support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Tinker and Hewlett Foundations. She was awarded a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for 1997-98, during which time she served as Special Adviser to the Executive Vice President of the Inter-American Development Bank. Graham, born in Lima, Peru, has an A.B. from Princeton University, an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a Ph.D. from Oxford University. She is the mother of three children.

Ross A. Hammond is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is director of the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy. His primary area of expertise is modeling complex dynamics of social, economic, political and public health systems using mathematical and agent-based computational methods. His current research topics include obesity, behavioral epidemiology, corruption and anti-corruption policies, ethnocentrism and inter-group relations, and the dynamics of trust.

Hammond received his B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Williams College, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. He has authored or co-authored numerous scholarly publications, on a wide range of topics, in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Evolution, Theoretical Population Biology, Preventing Chronic Disease, PLOS One, and Complexity. His work has been featured in New Scientist magazine, Salon and The Atlantic Monthly. Hammond serves on the editorial board of the journal Childhood Obesity and on the steering committee for the Comparative Modeling Network of the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (a joint venture of NIH, USDA and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation).

Hammond has previously been the Okun-Model fellow in economics at Brookings, an NSF IGERT IDEAS fellow in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, a visiting scholar at The Santa Fe Institute, and a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore. From February to December of 2002 he was the senior advisor to the president for welfare policy at the White House.

Prior to joining Brookings and Casey, he spent 14 years on the staff of the House Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee, first as welfare counsel to the Republican staff, then as the subcommittee’s staff director. From 1981-1985, he was a senior researcher at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He also taught and lectured on history and education at UNC, Charlotte and developmental psychology at Duke University.

Haskins was the editor of the 1996, 1998, and 2000 editions of the Green Book, a 1600-page compendium of the nation’s social programs published by the House Ways and Means Committee that analyzes domestic policy issues including health care, poverty, and unemployment. Haskins is a senior editor of The Future of Children, a journal on policy issues that affect children and families. He has also co-edited several books, including Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net (2002), The New World of Welfare (2001) and Policies for America’s Public Schools: Teachers, Equity, and Indicators (Ablex, 1988), and is a contributor to numerous edited books and scholarly journals on children’s development and social policy issues. He is also the author of Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (2006) and the co-author of Creating an Opportunity Society (2009) with Isabel Sawhill and Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Pew, 2008). He has appeared frequently on radio and television and has written articles and editorials for several newspapers and periodicals including the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, State Government News, American Enterprise, National Review, and the Weekly Standard.

His areas of expertise include welfare reform, child care, child support, marriage, child protection, and budget and deficit issues. In 1997, Haskins was selected by the National Journal as one of the 100 most influential people in the federal government. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (2000); the President’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Human Services from the American Public Human Services Association (2005); and the Lion Award from the Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families (2010).

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in History, a Master’s in Education, and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, from UNC, Chapel Hill. Haskins, who was a noncommissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps from 1963 to 1966, lives with his wife in Rockville, Maryland and is the father of four grown children.

Molly Jackman is a fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and is an expert on legislative institutions and U.S. state politics. Her research interests also include political geography, budgetary politics, and quantitative methodology.

Jackman’s dissertation, The Institutional Foundations of Majority Power, explores the ways in which procedural rules affect policy outcomes in the U.S. states. She finds that the majority party’s capacity to influence legislative outcomes varies depending on whether or not it can block bills in committee or during the bill scheduling process, and that these procedures affect policy outcomes and overall volatility. In addition to her work on state legislative politics, she has published research on the relationship between economic segregation in neighborhoods and voter turnout.

Jackman holds a BA from the University of California Santa Barbara and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

Bruce Jones is a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Managing Global Order (MGO) project in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. He is also the Director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

Dr. Jones served as the Senior External Advisor for the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report, Conflict, Security and Development, and in March 2010 was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General as a member of the Senior Advisory Group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities. He is also Consulting Professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and Professor (by courtesy) at New York University’s Department of Politics.

Dr. Jones holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and was Hamburg Fellow in Conflict Prevention at Stanford University.

He is co-author with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Brookings Press, 2009); co-editor with Shepard Forman and Richard Gowan of Cooperating for Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures (Lynne Reinner, 2001). Other publications include: Beyond Bloc: The West, Rising Powers and Interest-Based International Cooperation (The Stanley Foundation, October 2011); Libya and the Responsibilities of Power (Survival, June 2011); The G8 and the Threat of Bloc Politics in the International System (May 2011); The Changing Balance of Influence and U.S. Strategy (March 2011); How Do Rising Powers Rise? (Survival, December 2010); and Making Multilateralism Work: How the G-20 Can Help the United Nations (The Stanley Foundation, April 2010).

Dr. Jones served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Secretary-General during the UN reform effort leading up to the World Summit 2005, and in the same period was Acting Secretary of the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee. In 2004-2005, he was Deputy Research Director of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. From 2000-2002 he was Special Assistant to and Acting Chief of Staff at the office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process.

Dr. Joshua Meltzer is a fellow in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and at Georgetown Law School. Dr. Meltzer is also a reviewer for the Journal of Politics and Law. His work focuses on international trade law and policy issues relating to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Free Trade Agreements.

Dr. Meltzer’s research also includes the intersection between climate change and international trade and the role of trade policy in supporting access to the internet and cross-border data flows. He also writes on global governance issues with a focus on the legitimacy of the WTO and other international economic bodies such as the G-20.

Dr. Meltzer has been published in several peer reviewed law and policy journals and has also testified on international trade issues before Congress and the United States International Trade Commission.

A regular commentator in international print media, Dr. Meltzer has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Asahi Shimbun and in global newswires, including Bloomberg News and Thomson Reuters. He has also appeared on television news media outlets, including BBC, CNN and Fox News.

Prior to joining Brookings, Dr. Meltzer was a trade negotiator and legal advisor with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He was also posted as a diplomat to the Australian Embassy in Washington D.C. where he was responsible for trade and climate change issues. Dr. Meltzer has an S.J.D. and L.L.M from the University of Michigan Law School, Anne Arbor and law and commerce degrees from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Adele Morris is a fellow and policy director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution. Her expertise and interests include the economics of policies related to climate change, energy, natural resources, and public finance.

She joined Brookings in July 2008 from the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress, where she spent a year as a Senior Economist covering energy and climate issues.

Before the JEC, Adele served nine years with the U.S. Treasury Department as its chief natural resource economist, working on climate, energy, agriculture, and radio spectrum issues. On assignment to the U.S. Department of State in 2000, she was the lead U.S. negotiator on land use and forestry issues in the international climate change treaty process. Prior to joining the Treasury, she served as the senior economist for environmental affairs at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the development of the Kyoto Protocol. She began her career at the Office of Management and Budget, where she conducted regulatory oversight of agriculture and natural resource agencies. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Utah, and a B.A. from Rice University

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American foreign policy. He is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O'Hanlon is a member of the External Advisory Board at the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a commentator on Alhurra TV and also blogs for Fareed Zakaria's Global Public Square site at CNN.com.

O'Hanlon's latest books are Bending History: Barack Obama's Foreign Policy with Martin Indyk and Kenneth Lieberthal (Brookings Institution Press, March 2012); The Wounded Giant: America's Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity (Penguin Press 2011); A Skeptic's Case for Nuclear Disarmament (Brookings Institution Press 2010); Toughing It Out in Afghanistan with Hassina Sherjan (Brookings Institution Press 2010); and The Science of War (Princeton University Press 2009). He continues to coauthor Brookings's Afghanistan Index. He and Bruce Riedel wrote A Plan A- for Afghanistan in the Winter 2010/2011 issue of The Washington Quarterly and published a paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan for Brookings's Campaign 2012 project.

His other recent books include A War Like No Other, about the U.S.-China relationship and the Taiwan issue, with Richard Bush (Wiley 2007); a multi-author volume, Protecting the Homeland 2006/2007(Brookings Institution Press 2006); Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era (Brookings Institution Press 2005); The Future of Arms Control, co-authored with Michael Levi (Brookings Institution Press 2005); Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary: Constraining the Military Uses of Space (Brookings Institution Press 2004); and Crisis on the Korean Peninsula with Mike Mochizuki (McGraw-Hill 2003).

He has written several hundred op-eds in newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, The Financial Times, The Japan Times, and Pakistan's Dawn paper. O'Hanlon has appeared on television or spoken on the radio about 2,000 times since September 11, 2001.

O'Hanlon was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989-1994. He also worked previously at the Institute for Defense Analyses. His Ph.D. from Princeton is in public and international affairs; his bachelor's and master's degrees, also from Princeton, are in the physical sciences. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Congo/Kinshasa (the former Zaire) from 1982-1984, where he taught college and high school physics in French.

John Page is a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and a Director in the International Growth Centre of the London School of Economics and Oxford University.

From 1980 to 2008 Dr. Page was at the World Bank where his senior positions included: Director, Poverty Reduction, Director, Economic Policy, Chief Economist and Director, Economic and Social Development, Middle East and North Africa Region and Chief Economist of the Africa Region. Prior to his appointment at the World Bank, he was a member of the faculty at Stanford and Princeton Universities. He has held visiting professorships at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan.

He is a Research Associate at the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and has been a consultant to the African Development Bank, the Global Development Network, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the United Nations Industrial Development Program (UNIDO), the United Nations University – World Institute of Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), and the World Bank.

John Page obtained his Bachelors degree in economics from Stanford University and his Doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has published several books, including The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: 1993), Africa at a Turning Point? Growth, Aid and External Shocks (World Bank: 2008), and Breaking in and Moving Up: Industrial Challenges for the Bottom Billion and the Middle Income Countries (UNIDO: 2009). He is the author of more than eighty published articles on the economics of developing countries

Jonathan Rothwell is a senior research associate and associate fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program. His research focuses on urban economics, innovation, human capital, and economic opportunity. Since joining Brookings in 2009, he has authored or co-authored reports on international exports from metropolitan areas, the size, location, and characteristics of green jobs, how mismatches in the supply and demand for worker education affect unemployment, and how the availability of affordable housing and zoning policies affect educational opportunities. He is a frequent contributor to The Avenue blog at the New Republic, and he has published academic papers in journals such as Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Social Science Quarterly, and American Law and Economics Review. He earned a Bachelor of Science from Penn State, a master’s degree in economics from the New School, and a Ph.D. in policy from Princeton University.

Neil G. Ruiz is an Associate Fellow and Senior Policy Analyst at The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. He has over a decade of policy research experience for think-tanks, multilateral development banks, international organizations, and academia. He is an expert on international migration, innovation, economic development in both high-income countries and developing economies, and U.S. state and regional economic development.

He has published several highly impactful flagship reports at the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and publications at the Migration Policy Institute and the Brookings Institution on the intersection between migration and economic development, and state economic development. Ruiz recently was the lead author of a Brookings report, “The Search for Skills: Demand for H-1B Immigrant Workers in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” that provided the first spatial analysis of the demand for H-1B workers, as well as information on the programs funded by the H-1B visa fees for skills training and STEM education for existing U.S.

Adie Tomer is a Senior Research Associate and Associate Fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and a member of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative. The Initiative was established to address the pressing transportation and infrastructure challenges facing cities and suburbs in the United States and abroad.

Adie’s work primarily focuses on metropolitan transportation usage patterns, including personal and freight modes, and the intersections between transportation and technological development. He is a noted expert on driving trends, metropolitan aviation patterns, and transit connectivity. Adie managed and co-produced multiple groundbreaking studies to better understand the relationship between personal travel trends, spatial form, and transportation technology. He was the chief architect of a national study to measure access to jobs via transit, which required a combination of transit coding, transportation modeling, and demographic analytical techniques. Through this project, Adie worked alongside Microsoft executives and Danish transportation modelers to explore the relationships between urban development patterns, transit agency technologies, and service levels. Adie managed a synthesis of these results into an interactive mapping application, available on the Brookings site.

Walter D. Valdivia is a fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. He studies innovation policy and inequality, and focuses on technology transfer and the governance of emerging technologies.

Valdivia's published work includes studies of: public values of the Bayh-Dole Act, wage disparities resulting from the emergence of nanotechnologies, and the tensions between academic freedom and national security with respect to export controls. He has also co-authored a policy report assessing R&D investments in Arizona.

His current research examines the distributional outcomes of various modes of university technology transfer, the institutional path-dependence of innovation, and the role of academic freedom in the governance of emerging technologies.

Valdivia holds a B.S. in economics from Universidad Católica Boliviana, and an M.S. in economics and a Ph.D. in public administration from Arizona State University

Thomas Wright is a fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Managing Global Order project. Previously, he was executive director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and senior researcher for the Princeton Project on National Security.

Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgetown University, an M.Phil. from Cambridge University, and a B.A. and M.A. from University College Dublin. He has also held a pre-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a post doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. Wright's writings have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Orbis, Survival, The Washington Quarterly, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Washington Post, and a number of international newspapers and media outlets.

His current projects include the future of U.S. alliances and strategic partnerships, the geopolitical consequences of the eurocrisis, U.S. relations with rising powers, and multilateral diplomacy.