Kim Holmes

Kim R. Holmes, Ph.D., is one of Washington's foremost foreign and defense policy experts. He currently serves as the Vice President of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation and the Director of its Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. His expertise led Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to ask him to join his campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor in July 2007.

Career

Holmes started his career at the Heritage Foundation in 1985 as a defense policy analyst on weapons systems, the U.S. defense budget, military reform, and strategic defense. He rose through the ranks, holding the positions of Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies and Senior Policy Analyst for National Security Affairs specializing in arms control, NATO, and East-West strategic relations, before becoming a vice president in 1992.

In 2001, Holmes accepted a presidential nomination to serve as the Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs at the United States Department of State, where with a staff of over 400 people in Washington, D.C. and in U.S. multilateral missions based in New York, Geneva, Vienna, Paris, Rome, Montreal, and Nairobi, where he directed U.S. diplomatic efforts at the United Nations and 46 other international organizations. The issues in his portfolio ranged from Iraq and Afghanistan to peacekeeping missions, genocide in Sudan, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, human rights, development, aviation and maritime security, UN reform, reentry into UNESCO, and the gamut of technical, economic and political issues of concern to the international community.

In that position, Holmes led a State Department effort that achieved U.N. Security Council resolutions establishing (1511) and then re-authorizing (1546) the multinational force in Iraq. Resolution 1546 also reaffirmed the coalition force’s authority to take “all necessary measures” to contribute to Iraq’s security; it endorsed the formation of an interim government; it welcomed the end of the occupation; and it set the stage for elections in Iraq in January 2005.

Holmes also spearheaded efforts to get the Security Council to create a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sudan (resolution 1590), and its first-ever nonproliferation resolution (1540), which recognized the importance of global partnerships such as the U.S. Proliferation Security Initiative. Holmes also facilitated a new U.N. mandate that its Office of Internal Oversight Services must release its reports to member states who requests them. And he led an international outcry over Libya's assuming the chair of the Commission on Human Rights, which culminated in the establishment of a new Human Rights Council. He helped forge an ad hoc caucus of democracies at the U.N. and establish the new UN Democracy Fund. In every UN forum, Holmes not only stressed the importance of advancing political and economic freedoms, but also achieving greater effectiveness, efficiency, transparency and accountability.

In 2005, Holmes returned to The Heritage Foundation, where he leads a team of over 35 experts in international affairs. Holmes has expanded the work of the foundation in foreign policy and international relations, and was instrumental in establishing the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, the only such center in Lady Thatcher’s name in the world. Holmes is frequently consulted by the administration and by members of Congress, foreign government officials and international organizations such as the United Nations. He is a frequent presenter at international conferences. He has been interviewed extensively for his perspective on current events by domestic and foreign media, including C-Span, FoxNews, MSNBC, al-Jazeera, Kyodo News, and many others.

Holmes is also a published author and editor. He was the founding editor of the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal’s Index of Economic Freedom. The trade policy grades in the Index are used by the U.S. government to help determine a country’s eligibility for increased aid from the Millennium Challenge Account. Business and risk management firms also use the Index to assess foreign investment climates.

Shortly after 9-11, Holmes spearheaded a task force that produced a groundbreaking homeland security study in January 2002, Defending the American Homeland. In a 1995 volume, Defending America: A Near and Long Term Plan to Deploy Missile Defenses, Holmes help lay the intellectual groundwork for renewing the U.S. commitment to missile defense and ending self-imposed restrictions under the defunct Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He has edited a number of other important foreign policy books, including: Restoring American Leadership: A U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy Blueprint; Mandate for Leadership, a quadrennial guide for Congress and/or the Administration; Between Diplomacy and Deterrence: Strategies for U.S. Relations with China; Reshaping Europe: Strategies for a Post-Cold War Europe; and Strategic Defenses for the 1990s and Beyond. Holmes has also published scholarly articles in such journals as National Interest, Journal Aspenia (Italy), the African Executive, Harvard University’s International Security and Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs.

Previous to joining The Heritage Foundation, Holmes was Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, a research institute associated with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He was a research fellow at the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany, completing his doctoral dissertation in 1982 on the history of National Socialism in Bavaria between World War I and World War II. He has taught European security and history as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, where he earned his doctorate (1982) and master’s degrees (1977). He received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla., in 1974.

Holmes is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of its Washington Advisory Committee. He has served as a member of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board – which serves as the Secretary of Defense’s primary source of outside expert advice. Holmes has also served on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Center for International Private Enterprise, and as a public member of the U.S. delegation to the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Holmes is married with two children. He is also a member of the Institute for International Strategic Studies and the Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C.

Studies and Papers written by Kim Holmes

* [http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/bg2046.cfm Twelve Principles to Guide U.S. Energy Policy]
* [http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/hl998.cfm The U.S. and India: Partnership for the 21st Century (Lecture)]
* [http://www.heritage.org/Research/WorldwideFreedom/hl937.cfm Spreading Freedom Around the World]
* [http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/hl993.cfm North Korea Nuclear and Missile Issues: What's the Solution?]
* [http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/KimHolmespapers.cfm#2007Research The Heritage Foundation]

Books written by Kim Holmes

* [http://www.heritage.org/Research/features/index/ The Index of Economic Freedom]
* Reshaping Europe: Strategies for a Post-Cold War Europe (1990)
* SDI at the Turning Point: Readying Strategic Defenses for the 1990s and Beyond (1990)
* A Safe and Prosperous America: A U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy Blueprint (1994)
* The New Member’s Guide to the Issues
* Defending America: A Near- and Long-Term Plan to Deploy Missile Defenses
* Restoring American Leadership: A U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy Blueprint (1996)
* Between Diplomacy and Deterrence: Strategies for U.S. Relations with China (1997)
* Mandate for Leadership IV: Turning Ideas into Actions (1997)
* Issues: The Candidate’s Briefing Book,(1998,2000)
* Priorities for the President (2001)

External links

* [http://www.heritage.org Heritage Foundation Official Web Site]
* [http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/index.cfm Index of Economic Freedom]
* [http://www.thatchercenter.org/ Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom]
* [http://www.heritage.org/Research/WorldwideFreedom/upload/sr_8.pdf Reclaiming the Language of Freedom at the United Nations: A Guide for U.S. Policymakers]