Joshua Foust

Fellow

Expertise Entrepreneurship and National Security, National Security Strategy, Irregular Warfare, Central and South Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Russia, Defense Intelligence, and Social Media

Joshua Foust offers a new perspective. He adds deep historical and strategic context to events, and refocuses the discussion on the local political consequences of U.S. decisions. In doing so, he highlights a unique perspective on foreign policy.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net.

Joshua is currently researching the role of entrepreneurship in national security strategy, on the development of metrics in understanding national security policy, and on non-military implementations of foreign policy doctrine. He has written on strategic design for humanitarian interventions, decision-making in counterinsurgency, the intelligence community’s place in the national security discussion, and the changing role of privacy and secrecy post-Wikileaks. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia.

Previous to joining ASP, Joshua worked for the U.S. intelligence community, where he focused on studying the non-militant socio-cultural environment in Afghanistan at the U.S. Army Human Terrain System, then the socio-cultural dynamics of irregular warfare movements at the National Ground Intelligence Center, and later on political violence in Yemen for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic, a columnist for PBS Need to Know, and blogs about Central and South Asia at the influential blog Registan.net. A frequent commentator for American and global media, Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Follow @joshuafoust

Recent Appearances:

Joshua Foust attended the 2012 Young Atlanticist Summit in Bratislava, Slovenia, in April of 2012.

Joshua Foust gave a lecture on humanitarian interventionism at the University of Ottawa on March 21, 2012.

Joshua Foust spoke with Aljazeera English about the mass shootings in Afghanistan on March 13, 2012.

Joshua Foust hosted a roundtable discussion of Entrepreneurship and National Security on February 2, 2012.

ASP Reports:

Expeditionary Economics: A New Approach to Foreign Aid

Senate Testimony: “Making Intelligence Contracting Smarter: Reexamining Government Roles and Oversight”

Measuring Success: Are We Winning? 10 Years in Afghanistan

A selection of Joshua’s writings:

• PBS, “Memo to NATO: Stay Out of the Syrian Conflict,” April 18, 2012
• The Atlantic, “A Hollow Victory: The Slow Unraveling of Libya,” April 4, 2012
• The Atlantic, “How Short Term Thinking Makes the U.S. Worse at Fighting Wars,” March 31, 2012
• PBS, “When Intervention Fails,” March 26, 2012
• The Atlantic, “It’s Time for the U.S. to Finally Make Economic Peace with Russia,” February 21, 2012
• Registan.net, “Why Central Asia Isn’t Revolting,” February 20, 2012
• PBS, “Double Standards of Intervention,” February 14, 2012
• PBS, “Carrots, Not Sticks, for Iran,” February 2, 2012
• The Atlantic, “The Political Consequences of a Drones-First Policy,” January 27, 2012
• The Atlantic, “No Great Game: The Story of Post-Cold War Powers in Central Asia,” December 16, 2011
• PBS, “Defense Spending in an Age of Austerity,” November 16, 2011
• The Atlantic, “The Brilliant, Unworkable New Silk Road,” October 11, 2011
• The Atlantic, “The Politics of American Militarism,” 31 August 2011
• PBS, “The Looming Afghan Crash,” 17 May 2011
• Foreign Policy, “You Would Cry Too: In Defense of Hamid Karzai,” 28 September 2010
• The Century Foundation, “Post-Soviet Central Asian National Interests in Afghanistan,” 28 September 2010