Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958 in Athens, Greece) is an American historian, author and foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution. He is a co-founder of the now-defunct political organization Project for the New American Century. More recently, his book The World America Made has been publicly endorsed by US President Barack Obama, and its theme was referenced in his 2012 State of the Union Address.

Kagan graduated from Yale University in 1980, having studied history and having founded the Yale Political Monthly. He later earned an MPP from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a PhD in US history from American University in Washington, D.C. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.^{[citation needed]}

In 1983, Robert Kagan was foreign policy advisor to New York Representative Jack Kemp. Between 1984 and 1986, he worked at the State Department Policy Planning Staff and was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz. From 1986 to 1988, he served in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs at the State Department.^{[citation needed]} In 1997 he co-founded and served as a director for the now-defunct Project for the New American Century.

Alice Mitchell Rivlin (born March 4, 1931, in Philadelphia) is an economist, a former U.S. Cabinet official, and an expert on the budget. She has served as the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and the first Director of the Congressional Budget Office. In early 2010, Rivlin was appointed by President Barack Obama to his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Rivlin is a daughter of the physicist Allan C. G. Mitchell and a granddaughter of the astronomer Samuel Alfred Mitchell. She is a member of the Rivlin family.

Rivlin grew up in Bloomington, Indiana where her father was on the faculty of Indiana University. She briefly attended University High School in Bloomington before leaving to attend high school at The Madeira School. She then went on to Bryn Mawr College. Initially, she studied history, but after taking an economics course at Indiana University she decided to major in economics instead. She earned her Bachelor's of Art in 1952, writing her senior thesis on the economic integration of Western Europe.