William Courtney

William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. He chairs the board of trustees of Eurasia Foundation, which carries out programs abroad to improve governance and strengthen civil society. He co-chairs the international advisory council of the America 250 Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Semiquincentennial Commission. It is overseeing and encouraging commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States in 1776. For 28 years he was a career foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State, and served overseas in Brasilia, Moscow, Geneva, Almaty, and Tbilisi. He was Ambassador to Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the U.S.-Soviet Commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty. After retiring from State, he was a corporate executive for fourteen years and has been at RAND for eight years. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy. He has a BA from West Virginia University and a PhD from Brown University in economics. He is married and has two adult children.