Richard Fontaine is chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He serves concurrently as a member of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust and as Executive Director of the Trilateral Commission’s North America group. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council (NSC), and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Fontaine served as foreign policy advisor to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently as minority deputy staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was associate director for Near Eastern affairs at the NSC from 2003–04 and focused on Southeast Asia in the NSC’s Asian Affairs directorate.