Senior Advisor, CNQ Global Advisors
Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; former Assistant Secretary of State and Deputy National Security Advisor.
Read the bio →Elliott Abrams is a Senior Advisor to CNQ Global Advisors, a global geopolitical and strategic advisory firm chaired by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Abrams is also a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Abrams was educated at Harvard College, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School. After serving on the staffs of Sen. Henry M. Jackson and Daniel P. Moynihan, he was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration (for International Organizations, Human Rights, and finally for Inter-American Affairs) and received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award from Secretary George P. Shultz.
Mr. Abrams was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., from 1996 until joining the White House staff in June 2001. He served the Bush Administration first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the NSC for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations. From December 2002 to February 2005, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. He was Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy from February 2005 to January 2009, and in that capacity supervised both the Near East and North African Affairs, and the Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organizations directorates of the NSC. In the first Trump administration he was Special Representative for Venezuela and for Iran.
Mr. Abrams was a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2001 and Chairman of the Commission in the latter year, and served an additional term as a member in 2012-2014. He served as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council from 2009 to 2016, and as a member of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy from 2011 to 2023. He is chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition, chairman of the Tikvah Fund, and a member of the Advisory Council of the George W. Bush Institute and of the Human Rights Advisory Council of the McCain Institute.
Mr. Abrams is the author of six books, the latest of which, If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century, was published in October 2024.