Joseph Bosco

Joseph A. Bosco, national security consultant, retired in 2010 from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), where his portfolios over a seven-year period included strategic communications and Muslim outreach, East Asia security affairs, Iraq and Afghanistan coalition affairs, and disaster relief and humanitarian affairs, among other assignments. In the latter capacity, he worked extensively on the activities of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the ASEAN Regional Forum on the role of regional militaries in disaster relief and humanitarian affairs. He has traveled widely in the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to his OSD service, Mr. Bosco taught graduate seminars on China-Taiwan-U.S. relations in the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and earlier, in the Continuing Education Program, on the United Nations in the post–Cold War world and on international law, morality, and realpolitik. He organized a series of Georgetown conferences on U.S.-China-Taiwan issues. He also served as a senior fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Atlantic Council of the United States. In his earlier private practice in international law and government contracts, he was a member of the Massachusetts and District of Columbia Bars and was listed in Martindale-Hubbell’s Directory of Preeminent Lawyers.

Mr. Bosco served as special assistant to Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe and had been legal counsel to Mr. Volpe when he was governor of Massachusetts. He also served as a law clerk for the chief justice and associate justices at the Massachusetts Superior Court and law clerk to the Federal District Court in Massachusetts. Mr. Bosco graduated cum laude from Harvard College, where he majored in government and international relations. He earned his law degree at Harvard Law School and his master of laws degree in international law at Georgetown, where his honors paper focused on the international law implications of the 1995–1996 missile crisis across the Taiwan Strait. Mr. Bosco served in the U.S. Navy as a communications officer in the Western Pacific.