Thomas Graham

Thomas E. Graham is a former American diplomat and a managing director of the Kissinger Associates.

Thomas Graham began his career as a Foreign Service Officer in 1984 and until 1998 fulfilled various assignments, including two tours of duty at the Embassy of the United States, Moscow. There he served as head of the political and internal unit and even was a political counselor. In between the tours he worked on the Russian and Soviet affairs as a policy planning staff at the United States Department of State and at the same time was a policy assistant at the office of the undersecretary of policy defense.

From 1998 to 2001, Thomas worked as a senior associate of the Russia/Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In August 2001, he worked as the associate director of the policy planning staff at the Department of State, the position which he kept till May 2002. From June 2002 to February 2007 he was a special assistant to the President George W. Bush and at the same time was a director and later senior director of the United States National Security Council. As of 2007 he joined Kissinger Associates and is currently their managing director. He is also one of the co-founders of the Russian Studies Project at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs ofYale University.

Graham is known for his analysis of the US approach toward Russia's ambition and power after the fall of the Soviet Union. Regarding the 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine he had said that

The Ukraine crisis marked a shift in narrative that grew more pronounced as Russia flexed its muscles. In a few short years, Russia has been transformed in the American mind from a weak, declining power we could safely ignore into the main adversary, setting the agenda in the Middle East and determining the course of electoral politics in long-established democracies in the West. A West mired in domestic turmoil and politically polarized, as it is today, tends to inflate Russian power and the threat it entails.

In 2017 he had participated in the McCain Institute debate.

In 2018 Graham had called the Putin-Trump relations as "qualitatively worse than any post-Cold War period".

In July 2018 Graham had an interview with Michel Martin of the NPR at which he discussed the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and the 2018 Russia–United States summit.

In Fall 2018 he visited both Russia and Ukraine and in November had a discussion with the European Council on Foreign Relations regarding the US-Russia relations.