Kenneth M. Jensen has served as executive director of the American Committees on Foreign Relations since its beginnings in 1995. ACFR is a national nonpartisan association dedicated to dialogue between local and regional civic leaders and foreign policy makers and experts. Some of the entities that make up ACFR had originally been affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and many of these trace their histories to foundings in 1938. ACFR committees now number 33, of which several are recently created entities.
In present his capacity, Dr. Jensen is responsible for creating and managing the program of the committees and sends each member city as many as eight high-level speakers a year. In this, he draws on the community of policy intellectuals, business and professional leaders, the national and international media, and the diplomatic and academic communities. He also draws on the Executive Branch and Congress and on former policy makers. Dr. Jensen also stages an annual national conference for ACFR in Washington and, on occasion, conducts high-level study trips abroad. The most recent of these took a group of ACFR members to Russia and Lithuania in June 2004.
Dr. Jensen also produces an emailing of significant articles and news items on foreign relations called the ACFR NewsGroup. Begun in response to September 11, this has been distributed three times a week to ACFR members since then.
In addition to his ACFR responsibilities, Dr. Jensen speaks regularly across the United States on a variety of foreign affairs matters, including U.S. policy toward Russia, Central Asia, and the Balkans; ethnic and religious conflict; security and defense issues, and the changes in U.S. foreign policy making since the Gulf War. The topic closest to his heart is the American public dialogue on foreign affairs. Under this rubric he addresses the internationalization of local and regional economies in the United States and its social and economic consequences, as well as the deterioration of the concept of U.S. citizenship and the confusion of American values (especially as they relate to our competence in managing our foreign affairs).
Prior to assuming this position, Dr. Jensen was director of special programs and an officer in the corporation at the United States Institute of Peace, where he had previously been director of both the research and grants programs. In addition to the management of all in-house research undertakings, Dr. Jensen directed a number of Institute of Peace projects focusing on prospects for conflict in East Europe and the former Soviet Union. In 1989, he conducted the first public discussion of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History?" thesis and staged a major study group on the revolutions in East Europe in cooperation with the National Security Council and the U.S. Department of State. In 1990, Dr. Jensen organized two major conferences in Moscow and Washington on the origins of the Cold War, in which more than two dozen eminent Soviet and American historians and former officials exchanged views on perceptions of the early Cold War period. In June 1991, Dr. Jensen directed a conference on ethnic conflict resolution under rule of law involving, in addition to American legal scholars and ethnic conflict experts, more than fifty members of parliament, scholars, and civic leaders from East Europe and the (then) Soviet Union. In 1993, he directed projects on Russian foreign policy, drawing on members of the Russian parliament and presidential council as well as officials of the U.S. administration, and on economic growth and conflict in East and Southeast Asia (conducted in Thailand).
He is the editor, with Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute, of The Emergence of Russian Foreign Policy (November 1994). For a time the only book of it's sort, this volume revealed for the first time the content and enduring sources of the "strong Russia" policy that has since marked Russian foreign policy. Dr. Jensen has produced many other edited publications under United States Institute of Peace auspices, including Prospects for Conflict or Peace in Central and Eastern Europe (May 1990), A Look at "The End of History?” ; Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts 'Long Telegrams' of 1946; Pacifism and Citizenship: Can They Coexist? , and Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map .
Dr. Jensen holds degrees from the University of Colorado and did graduate study at the University of Wisconsin and Moscow State University. A veteran of a decade of college teaching, his fields of academic interest include Russian and Soviet history, European intellectual history, the history of Southeast Europe, the history of Turkey, and modern political philosophy. Dr. Jensen's doctoral research focused on the role of science in Russian Marxist social and political thought. He is author of Beyond Marx and Mach: A.A. Bogdanov's Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, and articles, papers, and reviews in the Russian, Soviet, and East European field. He has also been consulting editor of Studies in Soviet Thought.
Articles, reviews and letters on foreign affairs topics by Dr. Jensen have appeared in This World, The American Interest, the National Interest and other journals and newspapers. He is a regular participant in foreign policy working groups sponsored by a variety of Washington organizations. His media interviews, principally on events in the former Soviet Union and the mishandling of the Yugoslav crisis by the West, include The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, BBC, Voice of America, the Australian Broadcast Company, Finnish television, CNN International and National Public Radio, along with numerous foreign newspapers. Dr. Jensen is also editor (with Fred E. Baumann) of three public-policy–related books published by the University Press of Virginia: American Defense Policy and Liberal Democracy; Crime and Punishment: Issues in Criminal Justice; and Religion and Politics.
Prior to joining the United States Institute of Peace, he was director of grant programs at the Institute for Educational Affairs in New York. In this capacity, and under the leadership of journalist Irving Kristol and former treasury secretary William Simon, he managed a wide-ranging public policy and jurisprudence program, as well as a program in human rights and foreign policy and another supporting alternative student journalism.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr. Jensen was a college-level organizer for the American Federation of Teachers and served several terms on the AFT’s Colleges and Universities Advisory Council. He occasionally teaches American foreign policy in the SNSEE program at the National Defense University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee for the Present Danger.
A native of Wisconsin, Dr. Jensen lived for 17 years in Boulder, Colorado, both as a student and as an instructor in History and Political Science. He has also lived in Idaho (while teaching at Idaho State University), Ohio (while teaching at Kenyon College), and New York City. He is married to the former Priscilla Montgomery and lives in McLean, Virginia, with his two sons and daughter.