James Kirchick is a nonresident senior fellow for the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council. He specializes in US foreign policy in Europe, European politics and security, US-Germany relations, and human-rights issues. He is also a columnist for Tablet Magazine.

From 2017 to 2021, Kirchick was a visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe and Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution. Prior to Brookings, he was a fellow at the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington, DC, and a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow in Berlin. In 2010, he became writer-at-large for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, where he covered the politics and cultures of the twenty-one countries in the news company’s broadcast region. He covered major events including the First Libyan Civil War, a fraudulent presidential election in Belarus, and revolution and ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan.

Kirchick is a journalist who has written about human rights, political conflict, and culture from around the world. In addition to his role as a columnist for Tablet Magazine, he is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, New York Review of Books, National Review, and Times Literary Supplement, as well as Commentary Magazine and other publications. His next book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, is forthcoming from publisher Henry Holt and Co.

Kirchick began his professional journalism career at the New Republic covering domestic politics, lobbying, intelligence, and US foreign policy. Recognized for his voice on American gay politics and international gay rights, he is a recipient of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Journalist of the Year Award. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Kirchick is a graduate of the Roxbury Latin School and holds a BA in history and political science from Yale University.