Heidi Crebo-Rediker

Senior Fellow

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Heidi Crebo-Rediker is a senior fellow in the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), specializing in international political economy, U.S. economic competitiveness, economic security, and international finance. She directs the Roundtable Series on Global Political Economy. 

Crebo-Rediker served in the Obama Administration as the State Department’s first Chief Economist. She provided strategic advice to two Secretaries of State on the integration of economics and finance with geopolitics to help craft and launch “Economic Statecraft” in the Administration, including the design and implementation of economic and financial policy tools. Her remit encompassed a wide range of foreign policy issues, both crisis-related and longer-term challenges and opportunities with economic drivers. 

Previously, Crebo-Rediker was chief of international finance and economics for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, following nearly two decades in Europe as a senior investment banker. In the Senate, she advised on a range of international and domestic economic and financial issues, in particular, related to the global financial crisis, the eurozone crisis and sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund, multilateral development banks, and infrastructure investment. 

Over her investment banking career, she managed businesses including sovereign, supranational, and public-sector banking, European debt capital markets, and EMEA emerging markets debt capital markets. She managed public and private financing for governments, multilateral development banks, companies and banks, and related advisory work. She began her career in energy merchant banking after working for one of the first U.S.-Russian Joint Ventures, based on Sakhalin Island (Russian Far East). 

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission and previously served as a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Global Agenda Council on the United States. Her views are carried in many forums, including Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC's Morning Joe, WSJ, BBC, NPR, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and elsewhere.

Crebo-Rediker was named one of the Wall Street Journal Europe's Top 25 Women in Business. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

affiliations

  • International Capital Strategies, senior advisor
  • America’s Frontier Fund, strategic advisor

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.