Jim Mattis was raised in Southeastern Washington and graduated from Central Washington State College.

He served over 40 years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer, plus duty in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and as Commander of U.S. Central Command comprised of 250,000 U.S. and allied troops in combat across the Middle East and South Asia.

Retiring in 2013, he was a Davies Family Scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Subsequently he served as the 26th Secretary of Defense from January 2017 through December 2018.

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union in 1963, Garry Kasparov became the under-18 chess champion of the USSR at the age of 12 and the world under-20 champion at 17. He came to international fame at the age of 22 as the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985. He defended his title five times, including a legendary series of matches against arch-rival Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov broke Bobby Fischer’s rating record in 1990 and his own peak rating record remained unbroken until 2013. His famous matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996-97 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream.

Kasparov’s outspoken nature did not endear him to the Soviet authorities, giving him an early taste of opposition politics.  The world’s top-ranked player in his twentieth, Garry abruptly retired from competitive chess in 2005 to join the vanguard of the Russian pro-democracy movement.  He founded the United Civil Front and organized the Marches of Dissent to protest the repressive policies of Putin's government. In 2012, Kasparov was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Vaclav Havel.  His US-based non-profit Kasparov Chess Foundation promotes the teaching of chess in education systems around the world.

Garry has been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991 and he is a regular commentator on politics and human rights.  He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School with a focus on human-machine collaboration.

In 2017, Kasparov founded the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), an American political organization promoting and defending liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad. He serves as chairman of the group. Kasparov is also a Security Ambassador for the software company Avast.

Alain Juppé was born on August 15, 1945 in Mont-de-Marsan in the Landes region of France, and after obtaining an agrégation in Classics at the ENS, he entered the IEP in 1964 and graduated from the Ena in 1972. He first established himself politically in the capital alongside Jacques Chirac, of whom he was Minister of Budget, then Prime Minister.

In 2006, he was re-elected as mayor of Bordeaux (re-elected in the first round of the last municipal elections in March 2014). At the same time, he served in the Fillon government as head of several important ministries: Ecology (2007), Defense (2010-2011) and Foreign Affairs (2011-2012).

Benjamin Haddad is an expert on European politics and transatlantic relations. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, he was a research fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC. He has advocated for transatlantic unity in the face of Russian aggression, for greater European responsibility and for European investment in strategic issues. His book "Paradise Lost: Europe in the World of Trump" argues for greater European unity in a world of new challenges and threats.

He published in Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Politique Etrangère and is a frequent guest on France 24, BFM, CBC, CNN, Fox News and NPR.

In 2017, Haddad was the Washington DC representative of Emmanuel Macron's En Marche movement. A graduate of Sciences Po Paris, where he earned a master's degree in international relations, and of HEC with a master's degree in financial economics, Haddad taught international relations at Sciences Po.

​He was elected member of the French Parliament for the majority party "La République en Marche" in Paris in June 2022.

Novelist and philosopher, Pascal Bruckner is the author of a rich body of work of about thirty titles, which has earned him numerous awards (Medicis Prize for Essay, Montaigne Prize, Renaudot Prize), no less numerous translations abroad and screen adaptations. His latest titles include: Une brève éternité, philosophie de la longévité (Grasset, 2019), Un coupable presque parfait, la construction du bouc-émissaire blanc (Grasset, 2020) and Dans l'amitié d'une montagne : petit traité d'élévation (Grasset 2022).

The Ukrainian philosopher Constantin Sigov, who heads the European Center at Mohyla University in Kiev, was associate director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris from 1992 to 1995. He contributed to the establishment of the European Vocabulary of Philosophies (Paris, Seuil/Le Robert, 2004) and founded the publishing house Duh i litera (Spirit and Letter) in Kiev, which published authoritative Ukrainian translations of such great thinkers as Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas and François Furet. A friend of Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, he had them at the University of Kiev. For his tireless activity as a bridge builder between cultures, Constantin Sigov was decorated by France with the rank of Officer of the Order of Academic Palms. In 2014, he supported the Maidan Revolution, of which he was a leading voice. His personal work as a thinker, which occupies a major place in the Slavic world, meets a lively international echo.

Hubert Védrine is the founder of Hubert Védrine Conseil, a consulting firm specialized in international, economic and geopolitical issues. He is currently President of the Institut François Mitterrand.

Prior to that, Hubert Védrine was Minister of Foreign Affairs under the government of Lionel Jospin, from June 1997 to May 2022. From 1996 to 1997, he was a partner in the law firm Jeantet et Associés. He was a member of the Conseil d'Etat as maître des requêtes in 1986/1988 and in 1995/1993, then in 2002/2003. Since 2003, he has been leading a seminar at Sciences Po on the perception of threats in international relations.

From 1981 to 1995, he was diplomatic advisor and spokesman at the French Presidency and from 1991 to 1995, Secretary General. Prior to that, he was a civil administrator in the Ministry of Culture from 1974 to 1981. In 2020, he was appointed by France to participate in the group of personalities in charge of a reflection on NATO in 2030.

He is the author of numerous books, including Face à l'Hyperpuissance (2003, Fayard), Continuer l'Histoire (2007, Fayard), updated in 2008 and translated into English under the title History Strikes Back. In 2009, Le Temps des Chimères (Fayard), in 2012, Dans la mêlée mondiale (Fayard), in 2014 La France au défi (Fayard), in 2016 Sauver l'Europe (Editions Liana Levi). In 2018, he published Comptes à rebours (Fayard). In March 2019, a reissue of Sauver l'Europe is published; the essay is then rewritten and updated, its title Face au Chaos, Sauver l'Europe. In October 2019, he published with his son Laurent Védrine Olrik, the unauthorized biography (Fayard). In June 2020, he published an essay on the pandemic, Et après? (Fayard), reissued in an expanded version in the fall of 2021. In February 2021, he published a Dictionnaire amoureux de la géopolitique (Plon, Fayard). In February 2022, he will publish Une vision du monde in the Bouquins collection. Mr. Védrine also has a degree in history, and is a former student of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA).

Gabrielius Landsbergis is a Lithuanian politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 18th Government of the Republic of Lithuania led by the Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė. He is a Member of the Seimas for Centras- Žaliakalnis constituency, and a former member of the European Parliament. He was a member of Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats). Landsbergis was elected as the Chairman of the Homeland Union in 2015.

He is the grandson of Vytautas Landsbergis, a prominent Lithuanian politician, who was one of the founders of Sąjudis and the Chairman of the Reconstituent Seimas of Lithuania after its independence declaration from the Soviet Union.

Laure Mandeville has been a senior reporter at Le Figaro for 31 years. She was the Washington bureau chief of Le Figaro from December 2008 to August 2016. Laure Mandeville joined the foreign service of Le Figaro in 1989 to cover the end of communism. She covered the post-Soviet world for 20 years. She was Moscow bureau chief from 1997 to 2000. She also covered Islam in Europe from 2001 to 2008. Laure Mandeville holds a degree in Russian and Polish languages and civilizations from the University of Toulouse, a diploma from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and a DEA in Soviet studies. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard University, as a Fulbright and Sachs scholar. Laure Mandeville is the author of Qui est vraiment Donald Trump, Les Equateurs, 2016, of La reconquête russe, Grasset, 2008, which received the Louis Pauwels Prize and the Ailleurs Prize in 2009, as well as of L'Armée russe, la puissance en raillons, Ed n°1, 1994. She is a regular guest on C'est dans l'air, LCI and France 24. She also publishes in Politique internationale, La Revue des deux Mondes, the Wall Street Journal and The American Interest. Laure Mandeville is an associate member of the Atlantic Council think tank.