Nick Witney is a member of the Asylos Advisory Committee and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). He previously served as the first chief executive of the European Defence Agency in Brussels. Nick’s earlier career, after reading Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was spent in British government service, first with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and later with the Ministry of Defence (MOD). As a diplomat, he learned Arabic in Lebanon and Jordan, served in Baghdad, and spent four years as private secretary to the British ambassador in Washington, D.C.