Max Boot is Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He specializes in defense policy, proliferation, nation-building and peacekeeping, democracy and human rights, military technology, US foreign policy, and terrorism concerns.

Boot is a weekly foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, among others. He has lectured at various American military institutions, including the Army and Navy War Colleges, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School, the Army Command and General Staff College, the Marine Corps University, West Point, and the Naval Academy. Boot is a member of the US Joint Forces Command Transformation Advisory Group. Before joining theCouncil in 2002, Boot spent eight years as a writer at the Wall Street Journal, the last five years as an editorial features editor. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. His last book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic Books), was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor. He is also the author of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, published in October 2006 by Gotham Books. In 2004, Max Boot was named by the World Affairs Councils of America one of “the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy.” He holds a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley (1991), and a MA in history from Yale University (1992).