Rajan Menon
Adjunct Senior Research Scholar of International and Public Affairs
Personal Details
Rajan Menon holds the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science at the City College of New York/City University of New York and is a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. Until August 2012 he was the Monroe J. Rathbone Distinguished Professor of International Relations and chairman of the International Relations Department at Lehigh University. He has also taught at Vanderbilt and Columbia Universities.
Menon has served as Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fellow at the New America Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Visiting Fellow at the Harriman Institute (Columbia University), Senior Advisor and Academic Fellow at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Director of Eurasia Policy Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research NBR). He has received fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Carnegie Corporation, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
His books include The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, (Oxford University Press 2016); The End of Alliances (Oxford University Press, 2007); Ukraine in Conflict: The Unwinding of the Cold War Order (MIT Press, 2015), coauthored with Eugene B. Rumer; and Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986). His next book, What Will American Fight For? is being written under contract from Polity Press.
Recent articles include: “There is No Military Path to Victory in Afghanistan,” The National Interest (online), September 14, 2016; “The India Myth,” The National Interest (November-December 2014) “Asia’s Looming Power Shift,” The National Interest (September/October 2013); “R2P: It’s Fatally Flawed,” The American Interest,”(July/August 2013); “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Russia’s Invisible Civil War,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2010); “Breaking the State,” National Interest (May/June 2011), “Counterrevolution in Kiev: Hope Fade for Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2011); “When America Leaves: Asia After the Afghan War,” The American Interest (May/June 2012); and “Why Beijing and Moscow Oppose Intervention,” Current History (November 2012).
He blogs at the Huffington Post and writes monthly for The National Interest (online edition). His opinion pieces have appeared in the International Herald Tribune (now the Global New York Times), The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, CNN.com, Christian Science Monitor, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, and washingtonpost.com. He has been a commentator on NPR, ABC, BBC, CNN, MS-NBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and France TV-24.
Education
-
PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In The Media
Rajan Menon expands on the U.S.-Russia dynamic on the Russia-Ukraine crisis: "Much seems to be expected of sanctions — indeed, too much. If Putin orders a larger invasion, it’s a safe bet that he and his National Security Council have anticipated severe economic penalties from the West and deemed the steep price as something worth paying to achieve their objectives — which remain unclear — in Ukraine."
"We’ll never agree with the Russian leader on principles, but we might be able to negotiate a better security structure for Europe," Rajan Menon of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies (SIWPS) writes with Thomas Graham Jr.
“Both sides would incur massive losses in blood and treasure if their rivalry intensifies untempered by any sense of shared interests, and leads to war. Ditto the rest of the world,” Rajan Menon of the Saltzman Institute writes.
Despite the political divide in the US, both sides can agree that it's time to end the war in Afghanistan. Rajan Menon writes.