Security and Geopolitics

Alix Frangeul-Alves is a program coordinator on GMF’s Risk and Strategy team. Based in Paris, she focuses on US domestic politics and foreign policy, and the geopolitics of energy.

Frangeul-Alves holds a master’s degree from the French Institute of Geopolitics, where she specialized in security and defense, international relations, and diplomacy. She wrote master's theses on the geopolitical stakes of the energy transition in the United Kingdom and on the role of American natural gas in the transatlantic community’s geopolitical strategy. She speaks English, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Ambassador Brent Hardt is a resident senior fellow at GMF who brings 35 years of experience leading at all levels of government. He has guided five embassies as ambassador, chargé d’affaires, and deputy chief of mission, and served as foreign policy advisor to US Central Command and US Special Operations Command, working closely with allies to meet vital security challenges. As professor and senior advisor at the US Naval War College, he taught national security strategy and policy and developed a seminar on the evolution of modern Europe.

Hardt joined the US Foreign Service in 1988, serving in Berlin, the Hague, Rome, Paris, Canada, and the Caribbean. He was an exchange diplomat with the Netherlands Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense in 1993. In Washington, he served as Team Leader for NATO Policy in the State Department’s Office of European Political and Security Affairs, where he was responsible for NATO enlargement, NATO-Ukraine, and European Security and Defense policy issues.

Over the course of his career, Hardt has received multiple Senior Performance Awards, the Director General's Award for Reporting, five Superior Honor Awards, and three Meritorious Honor Awards. He also received the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Meritorious Civilian Service Award and the US Special Operations Command Distinguished Civilian Service Award. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s in law and diplomacy and a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.