Jim Baker

Jim Baker, an American strategist, is senior fellow for strategic competition at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is concurrently Strategist-in-Residence at Anthropic, where he works on the civilizational implications of powerful AI systems. Baker previously served as director of the Office of Net Assessment at the U.S. Department of Defense, producing long-range assessments that informed decisions by the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs of staff, and other cabinet officers. Over seventeen years in senior strategy roles in and out of uniform, he connected decades-ahead trends to present-day choices. Trained as an engineer, he has also overseen major defense technology programs and worked where technical depth meets statecraft.

Baker’s work at CFR centers on great-power strategic competition and the future of American strategy. His long-running book project, The Fitness of Nations, develops a diagnostic framework for assessing national vitality — 100+ criteria across nine dimensions, from population and territory to governance, innovation, and military power — designed to measure not just where a country stands but which direction it is heading. An interactive analytical platform on cfr.org will make the rubric explorable and usable. He is a contributor to CFR’s Future of American Strategy initiative.

Baker is also a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior advisor at the RAND Corporation.