Morton H. Halperin is a Senior Advisor to the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Policy Center. Halperin served in the federal government in the Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson administrations, most recently from December 1998 to January 2001 as Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State. In the Clinton administration, he was also Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council, a consultant to the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and was nominated by the President for the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping. In 1969, he was a Senior Staff member of the National Security Council responsible for National Security Planning. From July 1966 to January 1969, he worked in the Department of Defense where he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, responsible for political-military planning and arms control.

Halperin has also been associated with a number of think tanks. He was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from January 2001 to June 2003 and from March 1996 to December 1998. Halperin has been a Senior Vice President of The Century Foundation/Twentieth Century Fund, a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies of the Brookings Institution. In addition to his involvement in foreign policy issues, Halperin worked for many years for the American Civil Liberties Union. He served as Director of the Center for National Security Studies from 1975 to 1992, focusing on issues affecting both civil liberties and national security. From 1984 to 1992, he was also the Director of the Washington Office of the ACLU, with responsibility for the ACLU's national legislative program as well as the activities of the ACLU Foundation based in the Washington Office.

Halperin has authored, coauthored and edited more than a dozen books including Strategy and Arms Control (1961), Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (1974; 2nd Edition, 2006), Nuclear Fallacy (1987), Self-Determination in the New World Order (1992), and The Democracy Advantage (2004; 2nd Edition 2010). He has also contributed articles to a number of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Harpers, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, on subjects including national security and civil liberties, bureaucratic politics, Japan, China, military strategy, and arms control.

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