He was the penholder on the last two UK national security strategies and intimately involved in the foreign policy challenges of that period, from the creation of AUKUS to the war in Ukraine.
[3] In 2021, he also served as the UK's expert representative to the NATO secretary general's Reflections Group, which provided recommendations for the alliance's 2022 Strategic Concept.
[8] Former National Security Advisor Lord Ricketts describes his strength as “applying historical expertise to modern policymaking, using the lessons of the past, and using the strategies of previous statesmen to inform the way governments do strategic work now”.
He won the Member's Prize for the best MPhil in Historical Studies, before completing his doctoral dissertation "Politics, identity and the shaping of Unionism in the north of Ireland, from the French Revolution to the Home Rule Crisis" in 2006.
Bew is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the author of several books, including Realpolitik: A History (2015) and Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny, published by Quercus in the UK in 2011 and by Oxford University Press in the United States the following year.
British prime minister Boris Johnson selected Bew to lead an "integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy,[21] which advocated a "tilt" towards focus on the indo-pacific.