Matt Pottinger
Matt Pottinger
Matt Pottinger is a Senior Advisor at the Marathon Initiative and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Pottinger previously served at the White House for four years in senior roles on the National Security Council staff, including as Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, he coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy. Before that he served as Senior Director for Asia, where he led the administration’s work on Asia, and in particular its shift on China policy.
“Matt Pottinger conceptualized and drove the most important shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War,” said former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster about Matt’s role in helping reorient the United States toward great-power competition with China.
Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, Matt founded and led an Asia-focused risk consultancy and ran Asia research at a multi-strategy investment fund in New York.
