Michael Miklaucic, “USAID, Declining Diplomacy, Great Powers and War Crimes”

Michael Miklaucic, “USAID, Declining Diplomacy, Great Powers and War Crimes”

Moderator: Maj. Gen. Walter Givhan, (Ret.), ALWAC President.

Michael Miklaucic will speak to the continuing role of USAID and diplomacy in great power competition with China and Russia, including an assessment of the relative decline of non-military US policy instruments in relations with developing powers since the end of the Cold War. He will offer thoughts on the current strengths and weaknesses of the State Department and USAID, including issues of staffing, funding, "support on the Hill," and preferred legacy ways and means. He will also offer thoughts on future US policy challenges in dealing with the Ukraine war and its aftermath, drawing in part on his capacity as former Deputy for War Crimes at the State Department.

Miklaucic is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University, and the Editor-in-Chief of PRISM, NDU’s flagship journal of national and international security affairs. He currently serves as host and moderator of the INSS Speaker Series, and teaches an elective at NWC on “5G and geoeconomics.” Mr. Miklaucic is a visiting member of the academic faculty of the University of Chicago, and visiting lecturer at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany.

Prior to this assignment he served in various positions at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State, including Chief Operating Officer for the USAID Office of Democracy and Governance, and Rule of Law Specialist in the Center for Democracy and Governance. In 2002-2003 he served as the Department of State Deputy for War Crimes Issues. He later returned to State as USAID representative on the Civilian Response Corps Inter-Agency Task Force.

His areas of expertise are economic development; political reform; geoeconomics; transnational security threats, illicit networks, stabilization & reconstruction; conflict analysis; interagency operations; defense institution building; and he is conversant in French.

He studied at the University of California, the London School of Economics, and the Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School for Advanced International Studies.