William Henagan

Research Fellow

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William Henagan is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is an expert on U.S. industrial policy and economic security issues, as well as trade, infrastructure, development, competition, shipbuilding, and investment matters.

A former director for international economics on the National Security Council and the National Economic Council, Henagan spearheaded the development of ICE Pact, the trilateral partnerships among the United States, Canada, and Finland, as well as other shipbuilding, infrastructure, economic statecraft, and maritime industrial policy work ranging from tariff design to U.S. government investment strategy. As director for critical infrastructure on the National Security Council, Henagan was also one of the lead authors of the “National Security Memorandum on Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience,” which was the first major update to U.S. critical infrastructure policy in over a decade. He previously authored the Guidebook to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, an extensive readers guide to the seminal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, to help state, local, tribal, territorial government, and other partners navigate and implement the $1.2 trillion spending package. Henagan has held multiple other economic policymaking roles at the White House and the Department of Commerce across the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations.

Prior to government, Henagan worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company and currently serves as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He was also a technical advisor for the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center. Henagan holds graduate degrees in finance, social policy, and political science from the University of Virginia, University College London, and the University of Oxford, where he was a Jefferson and Marshall Scholar.

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.