Javier Solana

Why organisations work with Javier Solana

• Very few people alive have run both NATO and the EU’s foreign policy machinery. His read on transatlantic, Russian and Chinese intent is grounded in a decade of handling the actual files, not in commentary.
• He was the signing hand on the 2003 European Security Strategy, the document that still frames how European governments think about security, neighbourhood and partnership. Leadership teams exposed to European regulation get the logic from the source.
• His current work at EsadeGeo and Brookings is forward looking, not memoir. Briefings engage with AI governance, supply chain fragmentation, climate diplomacy and the fragility of the rules based order.
• He is a working columnist at Project Syndicate, publishing into 2026 on US-China competition, European strategic autonomy and the future of multilateralism. Boards get a current thesis, not career recollections.
• He operates comfortably as a counterpart to a CEO, chair or sovereign, and speaks to leadership teams on that level. The register is peer to peer, not lecture.

Biography highlights

• Secretary General of NATO, 1995 to 1999, including the alliance’s first post-Cold War enlargement and the 1999 Kosovo campaign.
• European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy and Secretary General of the Council of the EU, 1999 to 2009.
• Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1992 to 1995, and earlier holder of the Culture and Education and Science portfolios under Felipe Gonzalez.
• President, EsadeGeo – Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, Barcelona and Madrid.
• Distinguished Fellow in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution, and Senior Fellow at the Hertie School, Berlin.
• Charlemagne Prize 2007 and Carlos V European Award 2011 for services to European integration.

Biography

The European Security Strategy was signed in Brussels in December 2003. It was the first time the Union had put its name to a single, coherent description of what it was for in the world, what it was willing to defend, and how it intended to act with partners. Solana drafted it. Much of the architecture that European governments, and the companies that operate across them, still live inside was laid down in that document.

Before Brussels, there was Kosovo. As Secretary General of NATO from 1995 to 1999, he held together a nineteen-member alliance through the most contested military operation in its history, while also overseeing its first enlargement since the Cold War. Before NATO, he had spent thirteen years in the Spanish cabinet under Felipe Gonzalez, including three years as Foreign Minister. The arc is unusual: national politics, military alliance, civilian foreign policy, all at the top of each.

He now runs EsadeGeo, the Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics he founded in Barcelona and Madrid in 2010, and is a Distinguished Fellow at Brookings and Senior Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin. He chairs Aspen Institute Espana and sits on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Crisis Group.

What he offers a leadership audience is not the memoir of the files he handled. It is a structural read of where the international order is breaking, where it is holding, and what boards and executive teams should be doing with that information before the next shock lands on the balance sheet.

Key speaking topics

• The future of the rules based international order
• Transatlantic relations and European strategic autonomy
• US-China competition and the implications for global business
• Geopolitics of the energy transition and climate diplomacy
• NATO, European security and the war in Ukraine
• Multilateralism and global governance reform

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees of multinationals with material exposure to Europe, the US and China
• CEOs, chairs and chief strategy officers setting five to ten year strategic plans under geopolitical uncertainty
• Senior policy, risk and government affairs leads at financial institutions, energy and industrial groups

Audience outcomes

• A working model of which pillars of the international order are cracking, which are holding, and where corporate risk actually sits.
• A sharper read on European policy intent on China, industrial strategy, energy and sanctions, from the person who helped write the doctrine.
• Concrete framing on what transatlantic drift and US-China competition mean for supply chains, capital allocation and market access.
• A sense of how peers at the sovereign and multilateral level are framing the same questions your board is wrestling with.