High Stakes

Posted: July 20th, 2016

By Jeff Lightfoot

Jeff Lightfoot is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. He specializes in transatlantic security, European politics, France, and Middle East security. Lightfoot is a senior associate at the Jones Group International, an international business advisory firm founded by General James L. Jones specializing in trade promotion, market access, and strategic leadership. Prior to joining the Jones Group International in 2014, Lightfoot worked for six and a half years at the Atlantic Council, rising to the level of deputy director at the Brent Scowcroft Center. While at the Council, Lightfoot served as project rapporteur or report author for numerous, high-level Atlantic Council studies on the most pressing issues for US foreign policy, including US-Pakistan relations, US-Central Asian relations after Afghanistan, NATO, US-Russia relations, and American security assistance to Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Lightfoot has authored op-eds and articles for Defense News, CNN, the Boston Globe, the National Interest, the Fletcher Forum, the German Council on Foreign Relations, and La Revue International et Strategique, among others. He is a member of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung's Global Atlanticists network. Lightfoot received his BA and BS from Indiana University Bloomington and earned his MA from the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He has studied overseas at Sciences Po, Paris and the Rouen Business School and speaks French.

Last Thursday’s attack in Nice generates questions about France’s vulnerability to these kinds of threats and what the country and the region will do to respond. The Cipher Brief talked with Jeff Lightfoot, a senior associate at the Jones Group International and senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, about the various cultural, political, economic, and structural challenges France faces, as well as broader challenges this poses to European security.

The Cipher Brief: Can you give an overview of some of the internal dynamics in France that make it vulnerable to attacks like the one on Thursday evening – specifically in terms of the integration of the immigration community, internal security, and intelligence sharing?

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