Mitchell Reiss

Mitchell Reiss

Reiss (right) with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Ambassador David Manning, Secretary Paul Murphy & President George W. Bush at the White House St. Patrick's Day celebrations in 2005.

Mitchell Reiss is Republican Canidate Mitt Romney’s national security advisor, a senior American diplomat. He served as Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State under Colin Powell, and is currently U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, with the diplomatic rank of Ambassador, having succeeded Richard Haass in this role. He has degrees from Williams College, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Columbia Law School and Oxford. He was also selected to be a White House Fellow and was assigned to the National Security Council, where he worked both for Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell. Reiss is expected to step down from his role in Northern Ireland on January 31, 2007, and will be followed by Paula Dobriansky.[1]

He was Chief Negotiator for the United States in the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, an organization set up by the United States, South Korea, and Japan to implement the Agreed Framework on preventing nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula. He has served on the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford Foundation, the Cambridge Institute for Applied Research, the State Department, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

He is Vice-Provost for International Affairs, Professor of Law at the William and Mary Law School, and Professor of Government in the Department of Government at the College of William and Mary. He took a leave of absence from these positions while he was at the State Department.

As a Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, he has played an important role in the Northern Ireland peace process. However, after Reiss denied Gerry Adams a visa to the United States to spur the endorsement of policing and justice in Northern Ireland by Adams and his political party, Sinn Féin, Adams criticized Reiss on March 16, 2006 saying, "I don't have high regards for Mitchell Reiss's input into this process" and "If it is he who is advising the president, it's very very bad advice." Reiss responded "We try very hard to be an honest broker. I think if you look at the record, it demonstrates quite clearly that we don't play favorites - that we call it as we see it... We try to keep our eye on the main objective here - which is moving the peace process forward and keeping the focus on the people of Northern Ireland." Less than a year later, in January 2007, Sinn Féin formally endorsed policing and justice, thereby paving the way for the historic power-sharing arrangement with Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party on March 26, 2007.

Books

• Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities ISBN 0-943875-71-4
• Without the Bomb: The Politics of Nuclear Non-proliferation ISBN 0-231-06439-X
• Nuclear Proliferation after the Cold War (co-editor/author) ISBN 0-943875-64-1
• The Nuclear Tipping-Point (editor) ISBN 81-7049-227-0

External links

• Mitchell B. Reiss — official biography from the United States Department of State

• NI special envoy appointed — BBC News article, 12 December 2003