 Kim R. Holmes Nominated by President Bush in the challenging months following 9/11, Kim was confirmed in November 2002 and immediately took over responsibility for US negotiations at the United Nations and 46 international organizations. With a staff of over 400 in Washington, DC, and at US missions to international organizations in New York, Geneva, Vienna, Paris, Rome, Montreal, and Nairobi, he directed the diplomatic efforts to protect US interests and promote US policy on issues as varied as Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, peacekeeping, aviation and maritime security, development, reentry into UNESCO, and UN reform. Under his guidance, the United States achieved unanimous resolutions that established the legal framework for coalition forces in Iraq, lifted the UN's economic sanctions, established the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, and provided recognition for the Governing Council as well as a framework for establishing the new Iraqi government. Kim was also instrumental in assuring the UN Security Council acted on the matter of Sudan, proposing separate resolutions after negotiations failed to reach consensus on a single resolution. The strategy worked. These resolutions established the first UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan, sanctions on officials who supported groups conducting operations against civilians, and an appropriate role for the International Criminal Court in addressing atrocities while protecting US soldiers and citizens according to US laws. As Assistant Secretary, Kim consistently brought the weight of his international relations and foreign policy acumen - well honed over prior years at Heritage - to bear on matters of concern for the United States. He garnered multilateral support for a first-ever Security Council nonproliferation resolution that also affirms the utility of the US Proliferation Security Initiative. Kim helped secure a UN mandate that its Office of Internal Oversight Services must release its reports to member states upon request. He led the outcry over Libya's assuming chairmanship of the Commission on Human Rights, which began today's universal call for that body's total refashioning. Kim was instrumental in establishing both a democracy caucus and a Democracy Fund at the UN and in getting qualified Americans into high-level positions in various UN secretariats. In every multilateral forum, he made sure that US negotiators kept the focus on advancing freedom and always pressed for greater effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Kim returned to The Heritage Foundation as its principal spokesman on foreign and defense policy issues, and overseeing the research, personnel and programs of Heritage's Davis Institute, the Allison Center, the Asian Studies Center, the Center for International Trade and Economics, and the Moscow Office. He has published and edited important foreign policy products that have proposed many of the policies the US government has implemented over the years. For example, shortly after 9/11, Heritage went into overdrive to produce, by January 2002, Defending the American Homeland - the seminal guide to what policymakers needed to do to protect Americans from future nuclear, chemical, biological, and radiological attacks. In the 1995 Defending America: A Near and Long Term Plan to Deploy Missile Defenses, Kim and his defense team laid the intellectual groundwork for the successful campaign to get the United States to invest in missile defense and end its dangerous self-imposed strangulation under the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Kim was the founding editor of the internationally acclaimed Index of Economic Freedom, now in its 12th year and published annually with The Wall Street Journal. The Index's country grades on trade policies are now used by the US government to help determine eligibility for the Millennium Challenge Account. Corporations and risk management firms are also using The Index to assess foreign investment climates. Dr Holmes has co-edited a number of other important Heritage foreign policy books, including Restoring American Leadership: A U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy Blueprint; Mandate for Leadership, a quadrennial guide for Congress and/or the Administration; Between Diplomacy and Deterrence: Strategies for U.S. Relations with China; Issues: The Candidate's Briefing Book series; Reshaping Europe: Strategies for a Post-Cold War Europe; and Strategic Defenses for the 1990s and Beyond. And he has published numerous scholarly articles in such journals as Journal Aspenia (Italy), Harvard University's International Security and Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs, and National Interest Online. Kim is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of its Washington Advisory Committee. He has served as a member of the Department of Defense's Defense Policy Board - the Secretary of Defense's primary source of outsider expert advice. He also served on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Center for International Private Enterprise, and as a public member of the US delegation to the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Prior to first becoming Heritage's Vice President in April 1992, Kim was Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies and Senior Policy Analyst for national security affairs at Heritage, specializing in arms control, NATO affairs, and East-West strategic relations. He joined Heritage in 1985 as a defense policy analyst focusing on weapons systems, the defense budget, military reform, and strategic defense. Before coming to Heritage, Kim was Senior Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, a research institute associated with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Kim holds PhD (1982) and MA (1977) in history from Georgetown University in Washington, DC and taught there. He received his BA in history from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, in 1974. Kim was a research fellow at the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany, in 1981, completing his PhD dissertation the following year on the history of national socialism in Bavaria during the inter-war period. He subsequently taught courses on European security issues and European intellectual history at Georgetown University as an adjunct professor.
This page last updated 3/11/2007 jdb |