Rajan Menon is the Director of the Grand Strategy program at Defense Priorities and the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair Emeritus in International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York/City University of New York. He is also a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He has been a Fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs and the New America Foundation, Academic Fellow at the Carnegie Corporation, Research Scholar the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (the Wilson Center), and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His books include Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986), The End of Alliances (Oxford University Press, 2007), Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, coauthored with Eugene Rumer (MIT Press, 2015), and The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2016). His next book, Russia After Putin, coauthored with Eugene B. Rumer, is under contract to Oxford University Press.

In addition to publications in numerous academic journals, Menon has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Foreign Affairs, The Boston Review, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Newsweek, The Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, US News & World Report, and CNN. He has appeared as a commentator on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, NPR, France 24 Television, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Radio Australia.

In 1989–90, while an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, he served as Special Assistant for National Security (focusing on arms control) on the staff of Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY), chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia-Pacific Subcommittee.