Romesh Ratnesar was a fellow in New America's International Security program. He was also a 2012 Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow with the New America Fellows Program. He is a distinguished journalist, author, and former State Department official. From 2015 to 2017, he served as chief of staff in the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Prior to joining the State Department, Ratnesar was the deputy editor and international editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of Tear Down This Wall: A City, A President and the Speech that Ended the Cold War (Simon & Schuster).
Ratnesar spent nearly 15 years as an editor, correspondent and foreign-policy columnist for Time, serving as the magazine’s foreign editor and deputy managing editor. He has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, the New Republic, the Washington Monthly and Mother Jones. Ratnesar has been awarded fellowships by the Hoover Institution, New America, the Aspen Institute, and the French-American Foundation. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ratnesar received his M.A. and B.A. in history, with distinction, from Stanford University.