Biography
Jordan Becker is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, where his research examines how states generate, sustain, and adapt strategic power. In autumn 2027, he will join the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. He was previously Academy Professor of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point and Director of its Social Science Research Lab. He received his BS from Georgetown University (2001), master's degrees from Columbia University and Sciences Po (2011), and his PhD in War Studies from King's College London (2017). Before becoming an Academy Professor, he served as a U.S. Army infantry and Special Forces officer and later as defence policy advisor at the U.S. Mission to NATO, military assistant to the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and U.S. Joint Staff liaison to the French Joint Staff. He holds research appointments at the Brussels School of Governance, Bruegel, IRSEM, and IHEDN.
Jordan's scholarship concerns how governments translate political preferences into strategy, strategy into military capability, and national capabilities into effective alliance cooperation. Working across political science, defence economics, and security studies, he has written on NATO burden sharing, the domestic politics of defence spending, strategic culture, arms control, military assistance to Ukraine, and the political economy of transatlantic security.
Jordan's current research applies computational methods to enduring questions of statecraft. With collaborators, he has assembled one of the world's largest corpora of national security strategy documents, which he analyses using large language models to measure strategic priorities and alignment across governments. Related projects examine how defence industrial policy shapes the production of military capability and how party politics shape European public support for security cooperation. At the EUI, he anticipates expanding the Carnegie-funded West Point Social Sciences Seminar into a transatlantic forum for scholars and practitioners.