Jared Cohen

Adjunct Senior Fellow

Profile picture

Expert Bio

Jared Cohen is co-head of the office of applied innovation and president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Previously, he was founder and CEO of Jigsaw, an independent unit at Google focused on building technology to address global security challenges. He was Google’s first director of ideas and chief advisor to Google’s CEO and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010 he served as a member of the Secretary of State’s policy-planning staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Cohen is the New York Times best-selling author of five books, including Children of Jihad, One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Business, and Our Lives, which he co-authored with Eric Schmidt, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America, and the forthcoming Life After Power. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Time, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

He has been named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Vanity Fair’s New Establishment. Cohen serves on several advisory boards, including those of Allianz, ASAPP, Fluid Market, the National Counterterrorism Center, Rivet Ventures, the Secretary of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is a member of Gen Next and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Cohen received his BA from Stanford University and his MPhil in international relations from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He speaks fluent Swahili.

Clear All
Regions
Topics
Type

Top Stories on CFR

Indonesia

Prabowo Subianto was named the winner of the Indonesian presidential election. But it is unclear which version of Prabowo—the more moderate candidate from the campaign trail or the self-styled strongman—will govern Indonesia.

Russia

The mass casualty theater attack in Moscow was a reminder that affiliates of the Islamic State have reorganized and infiltrated even powerful states.

India

With India's development continuing to gain steam, one of the biggest challenges will be to avoid the mistake that others have made when they failed to recognize their newly acquired global systemic influence and adapt accordingly. Both China and Big Tech show that it is never too early to start managing one's own rise.