Henry Haggard is a nonresident fellow for the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies. He is a Senior Advisor at WestExec, a strategic advisory firm, and an associate fellow with the KF-VUB Korea Chair at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy. In 2024, he completed a 25-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service, retiring as a member of the Senior Foreign Service, counselor rank. From 2021–23 he served as the top advisor on Korean politics and managed our bilateral security relationship at the U.S. Embassy in South Korea. Prior to that, he served as director at the National Security Council under both the Trump and Biden administrations, coordinating our engagement with Turkey and the U.K. Henry most recently served as the director for energy diplomacy, responsible for U.S. energy policy related to Asia and the Middle East, where he built U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral energy cooperation in furtherance of the Camp David Summit goals. 

Henry’s previous assignments include acting political minister counselor at the U.S. Mission to the EU, chief of staff to the secretary’s special representative for Syria engagement, deputy principal officer in Erbil, Iraq, special assistant to the assistant secretary for European affairs, three tours in the State Department’s Executive Secretariat, a tour in Baghdad, and one stint at the U.S. Embassy in Paris.  

He speaks fluent Korean and French and received a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Brown University and a master’s degree  in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. Henry is the principal at Seekonk LLC, a global strategy group, and founder of the Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship, a resource for diplomatic tradecraft.

Contact at [email protected].