Richard Fontaine

Chief Executive Officer

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.

At the State Department, Fontaine worked for the deputy secretary and in the department’s South Asia bureau. Fontaine began his foreign policy career working on the Middle East and South Asia for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also spent a year teaching English in Japan.

Fontaine is the coauthor, with Ambassador Robert Blackwill, of Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power. He served on the Defense Policy Board from 2021 to 2025 and has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

A native of New Orleans, Fontaine graduated summa cum laude with a BA in international relations from Tulane University. He also holds an MA in international affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, and he attended Oxford University. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their four children.