Amb. Kelley E. Currie (ret.)

Amb. Kelley E. Currie (ret.) is a national security and foreign policy expert with wide-ranging experience in the Executive Branch, Congress, think-tanks, and international non-governmental organizations. She is an internationally recognized expert on non-traditional and economic security issues in Asia, including supply chain resilience, alliance management, and sanctions.

Kelley began her foreign policy career serving simultaneously as the majority staff director of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and State/Foreign Operations appropriations associate for Congressman John E. Porter (R-IL). She then went to the International Republican Institute, where she crisscrossed Southeast Asia to work with emerging political parties and local governments in Indonesia, advise new politicians and observe elections in Timor Leste, and support underground democracy activists in Burma. After her first stint at the State Department, as Asia policy advisor to the Undersecretary for Global Affairs, she spent nine years with Project 2049 Institute, a thinktank that focused on national security issues in the Indo-Pacific. She returned to government in 2017 to serve at the USUN, and followed that appointment with additional service as acting senior official in the Office of Global Criminal Justice and U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.

Amb. Currie is a co-founder of Kilo-Alpha Strategies, a boutique geopolitical consulting firm focused on advancing American national security and a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Strategy Initiative of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In addition, she currently serves as an adjunct senior fellow with the East-West Center and on the advisory boards of Spirit of America, the Global Taiwan Institute, and the Vandenburg Coalition.