Ira Straus

Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO. The Committee was formed in 1992 by bringing long-standing Atlanticists in the West together with new Atlanticists in Eastern Europe and Russia, in order to foster public discussion of how to respond to the appeals from the governments of Russia and the other post-Communist countries to join NATO. It conducts studies with a view to the changes needed for including Russia alongside its neighbors in the Alliance.

Straus has been Fulbright professor of political science at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Moscow State University, Higher School of Economics, and Russian State Humanities University. He has a BA in Russian History from Princeton University and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Virginia. From 1985-1991 he was executive director of the Association to Unite the Democracies, one of the original Atlanticist organizations, formed in 1939 and numbering among its early adherents the persons in the State Department who became framers of the Marshall Plan and NATO.