Dr. Alexander Bick’s career reflects the ways he’s drawn on history and scholarship to try to advance democracy, peace, and stability in international relations. His path has been a winding one. But from directing election observation missions in Liberia and Libya with the Carter Center to coordinating the US response to Syria in the Obama administration to researching as a Wilson Center Fellow to leading the Biden administration’s “Tiger Team,” and now teaching at the University of Virginia, Bick strives to learn from every experience to improve the way the United States and others approach the next crisis.

Bick’s upbringing as the son of two anthropologists immersed him in the reality of global crises at an early age. In 1989, when he was twelve, his family left upstate New York to spend a year in Liberia. Their time there overlapped with the beginning of a 14-year-long civil war. “As a little kid, I tracked on a map as [Charles] Taylor’s rebel forces advanced southward toward us and, ultimately, the Capitol.” His family was evacuated, only returning in 1998 when the first phase of the war had ended to witness firsthand the human and infrastructural devastation wrought on the country. This experience propelled Bick into his lifelong interest in efforts to prevent or at least mitigate the costs of war.

Bick attended University of Chicago for undergraduate studies, writing his senior thesis on state collapse in Liberia. He accepted an internship at the Carter Center, where he worked on conflicts in neighboring Sierra Leone and in Sudan, as well as an election and mediation initiative in Venezuela. Later, while completing his PhD in history at Princeton, he accepted a director role of the Carter Center’s election observation mission in Liberia. “I’ve worked on some tough problems, and many of them have not gone well. But this one did, and [in 2005] Liberia had a successful transfer of power to a democratically-elected government.” Next, the Carter Center sent Bick to Libya, where he led another election observation mission before joining the State Department in fall of 2012.

Applying his work with civil wars and contested elections in Africa and Latin America, Bick shifted his focus to the Middle East while working in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and then the Policy Planning Staff. During the Arab Spring, he recognized how instability in the Middle East and North Africa was becoming mutually reinforcing, creating opportunities for terrorist organizations to take root and expand their operations – and helped craft a strategy to address this challenge.

Bick inherited the Syria portfolio in Policy Planning in May 2013, and went on to serve at the White House National Security Council as Syria Director for two years.

Arriving at the Wilson Center, Bick was “still processing that experience” and trying to “think through the many things that we had gotten wrong and some of the things I still believe that we got right.” For his research, he considered US engagement in Syria as a case study to explore how the Obama administration approached emerging great power competition with Russia. “For many of the crises that I was working on, Russia became a key player in a way that it hadn’t been a decade before, and I think that really led me to rethink Russia as a peripheral factor in global crises to being a central one.” Bick used his time at the Wilson Center as a fellow in the Middle East Program and Kennan Institute to deepen his understanding of Russian foreign policy and history. From his time at the Wilson Center, Bick published “Assad the Spoiler: Russia’s Challenge in Syria” and a chapter on Russia in Re-Engaging the Middle East, titled “A New Cold War in the Middle East?” He laments that his time for pursuing scholarship and collaboration with outstanding colleagues at the Center was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After he left the Wilson Center, Bick was invited to join the Biden-Harris transition team, contributing to policy work and serving on the agency review team for the National Security Council. There was a “shared view that we needed to develop a more comprehensive and consistent approach to Russia,” he recalls. In fall of 2021, the White House received intelligence that Russia was planning a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Bick was selected to lead the US government’s contingency planning effort, known as the “Tiger Team.”

In this role, Bick was again grateful for the opportunity he had at the Wilson Center, especially the chance “for a former public official to reflect on their experiences, to deepen their knowledge in a particular area, and then to translate that into policy.” The Tiger Team proved instrumental in helping to build a robust coalition of allies and strengthening NATO to support Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. “It would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, if we hadn’t been prepared in the way that we were.”

Bick left the Biden administration in December 2023 and is now a professor at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, where he translates his experience in public service and the thinking and research he was able to do at the Wilson Center into his courses.

Especially now, when so much in international relations is contested and uncertain, Bick believes in “the value of a historical perspective, and the value of thinking about the world the way historians do.” That means understanding that events are contingent and can evolve in ways that you don’t initially perceive. “It’s enormously challenging to anticipate what’s likely to happen, what people are likely to do, how they perceive the world, and how those perceptions will shape their actions.” It also means that choices matter.

Over his career, Dr. Alexander Bick has returned to a basic lesson: humility and the value of being prepared, especially when it comes to decisions about war and peace.