Radosław Sikorski

Radosław Sikorski (57) is a Member of European Parliament where he chairs the EP Delegation for relations with the United States. He served as Minister of National Defense of Poland from 2005 to 2007, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2007 to 2014, and speaker of Poland’s parliament from 2014 to 2015. Sikorski graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and an M.A. in politics, philosophy and economics (PPE). He headed the students’ strike committee during the unrest in Bydgoszcz in March 1981 and was granted political asylum in Great Britain in 1982-89. He was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola in 1986-89. Sikorski won the World Press Photo award for a photograph taken in Afghanistan in 1987. As deputy minister of national defense in 1992, Sikorski initiated Poland’s NATO accession campaign. From 2002 to 2005, he was resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative. Sikorski is the author of several books, including Dust of the Saints and The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland. In 2012, he was named one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine “for telling the truth, even when it’s not diplomatic.”