The Honorable Josh Black is Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs on the National Security Council (NSC) staff at the White House. In this role, he advises the President on a broad range of multilateral issues and leads the White House team responsible for our engagement at the United Nations and other international organizations, global criminal justice, and refugee/migration policy. 

 In the first two years of the Biden-Harris Administration, Mr. Black served as Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Based in the ambassador’s Washington office, he supported Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield in her role as a member of President Biden’s Cabinet and advised her on polices related to the United Nations, sanctions policy, and European affairs, including the war in Ukraine. From 2017-2020, Mr. Black worked in the private sector on global health issues.

During the Obama-Biden Administration, he was the Director for UN and Multilateral Affairs on the National Security Council staff at the White House in 2016-2017. In this capacity, he supported inter-agency policymaking related to the United Nations, including UN peacekeeping, UN Security Council engagement, and the UN Human Rights Council, as well as served as the White House lead on international LGBTI rights issues. From 2008 to 2016, Mr. Black worked on a range of national security issues at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where he led the Mission’s sanctions and counterterrorism team. Mr. Black was the lead U.S. negotiator on major UN Security Council resolutions on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear threats, the 2011 conflict in Libya, the civil war in South Sudan, and the ISIS terrorist threat. In 2015, he served on the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran nuclear talks, with lead responsibility for the UN-related aspects of the Iran nuclear deal.

Prior to working on multilateral affairs, Mr. Black was the State Department’s coordinator for U.S. participation in the Kosovo Future Status Process (2006-2008) and served in a number of State Department positions related to the former Yugoslavia. He joined the State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow (2000-2002), and later worked as a foreign policy fellow in the U.S. Congress (Office of Senator Edward Kennedy) and served twice overseas at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Pristina, Kosovo. Josh holds a Bachelor’s degree from Ohio State University (Spanish and Political Science) and a Master’s in Public Affairs from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.