Kori Schake

Since 2019, Schake has also been serving on the Transatlantic Task Force of the German Marshall Fund and the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung (BKHS), co-chaired by Karen Donfried and Wolfgang Ischinger.

Schake was raised in a small town in Sonoma County, California, by her parents Cecelia and Wayne, a former Pan Am pilot. Kori has a brother and sister. Kristina Schake, her 8-year-younger sister, has also worked in the White House, and played key roles in presidential campaigns, but on the Democratic side, working with Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. Kori is a Republican. Despite their political differences, they remain very close.

Schake left the State Department in order to serve as a senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign, where she was responsible for policy development and outreach in the areas of foreign and defense policy. Earlier in the campaign, she had been an adviser to Rudy Giuliani.

Schake was the Deputy Director for Policy Planning in the U.S. State Department from December 2007 to May 2008. Her responsibilities included staff management as well as resourcing and organizational effectiveness issues, including a study of State Department reforms that enable integrated political, economic, and military strategies.

Schake's first government job was with U.S. Department of Defense as a NATO Desk Officer in the Joint Staff's Strategic Plans and Policy Division (J-5), where from 1990–1994 she worked military issues of German unification, NATO after the Cold War, and alliance expansion. She also spent 2 years (1994–1996) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the special assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Strategy and Requirements.

Kori N. Schake (born 1962) is the Deputy-Director General of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She has held several high positions in the U.S. Defense and State Departments and on the National Security Council. She was a foreign-policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign. Schake is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

During President George W. Bush's first term, she was the director for Defense Strategy and Requirements on the National Security Council. She was responsible for interagency coordination for long-term defense planning and coalition maintenance issues. Projects she contributed to include conceptualizing and budgeting for continued transformation of defense practices, the most significant realignment of U.S. military forces and bases around the world since 1950, creating NATO's Allied Command Transformation and the NATO Response Force, and recruiting and retaining coalition partners for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.