McCain's Brain Trust

Stephen E. Biegun, vice president of international governmental affairs for Ford Motor Company, has served as national security adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and was executive secretary of the National Security Council from 2001 to 2003.

An April 2007 paper that Biegun coauthored with Jon B. Wolfsthal for the Stanley Foundation expresses concern that "we are losing control of nuclear weapons proliferation." The paper says U.S. leadership is crucial in bolstering prevention efforts, which should involve: " potential deep reductions in nuclear weapons, support for a broad set of negotiated agreements, engagement with states friendly and otherwise to achieve stated goals, and an effort to undercut the basic assumptions of why states acquire nuclear weapons and the lengths to which the United States should go to prevent their proliferation." It says the United States should "pursue a full-court diplomatic press using all available and conceivable tools to reinforce its nonproliferation goals" to derail the Iranian nuclear effort.

Biegun served as a member of the CFR 2006 Independent Task Force on Russia, which warned of backsliding on Russian democratization and urged the Bush administration to take steps to improve the relationship while affirming the U.S. right to bolster reformist nations in Russia's sphere of influence.

Richard S. Williamson has held senior foreign policy posts under presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He was most recently named U.S. special envoy to Sudan in January 2008, charged with dealing with the Darfur crisis. Williamson has a long background in UN diplomacy and has been an advocate of advancing U.S. interests through the United Nations, while expressing concern about UN efficiency. He has d escribed his failure to secure a strong resolution at the UN Commission on Human Rights against the Sudanese government actions in Darfur as one of his greatest disappointments in twenty years of multilateral diplomacy.

Williamson has also spoken out repeatedly against Russian retrenchment of democratic reforms under President Vladimir Putin. He told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an October 2007 interview that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) must stand up to Russian resistance to reforms: "The Russian Federation is a [signatory] of the Helsinki Accords and a large number of subsequent OSCE commitments dealing with human rights, rule of law, and democracy, and the Helsinki process commits every one of the 56 member states to have a right to examine other countries' fidelity to those commitments and it's important that the other countries of the OSCE stand up for those standards, whomever might be challenging them."

Peter W. Rodman is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on regional policies ranging from the Middle East to East Asia. Rodman served as a senior foreign policy official in five Republican administrations, including as a top aide to Henry Kissinger. He served most recently as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Bush administration from 2001 to 2006. Since leaving the administration he has expressed concern about the hard-line nature of regimes in Iran and Syria. In a December 2007 appearance on PBS's NewsHour he was doubtful of the usefulness of direct talks with Iran: "[T]his is a revolutionary regime still in a militant phase," he said. "So I'm not sure a conversation is going to charm them out of their ambition." On Syria, he told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in April 2008 that "conditions do not exist for an improvement of relations with Syria so long as Syrian policies remain hostile to important interests of ours in the Middle East."