Jared Cohen
Member Since
2008
Jared Cohen (born November 24, 1981 in Weston, Connecticut) is a non-fiction author and member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, where he has served since September 2006. Initially brought in by Condoleezza Rice as the youngest member in history, he is politically transcendent and has continued to play an important role under Hillary Clinton.
In this capacity, he focuses on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Youth, and Technology. Prior to his work at the State Department, Cohen received his BA from Stanford University and his M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Cohen has become a specialist in the use of technology to advance American interests throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia. In December 2008, Cohen assembled the first ever Alliance of Youth Movements, which was a summit of 21st century movements that relied almost entirely on technology to affect change. In April 2009, he took senior executives from Silicon Valley to Iraq on the first ever US government technology delegation. Eight months later, Cohen brought Google CEO Eric Schmidt to Iraq in what was the first trip to Iraq by an American CEO from a leading technology company. During June 2009 he intervened to keep the Twitter network online, delaying scheduled engineering work, so that supporters of the Iranian opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, favored by the U.S., could continue using the network to plan anti-government activities.