A few decades later, in 2008, O’Neill was asked to challenge the assumptions of General Petraeus’ senior inter-agency group then devising a sustainable strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He led off with that earlier encounter and asked: “What would be the answer today?”
O’Neill, a retired partner in a Boston-based national law firm, became an éminence grise in foreign relations and defense policy by balancing his international practice as a lawyer and arbitrator with an academic career, including teaching at Harvard and elsewhere. The author of two books on national security published by Oxford, he joked that there were “no Hollywood producers interested in them.” His arbitrator practice ranged from disputes involving genetically engineered pharmaceuticals to the development of the F-35 jet fighter.
As a counselor O’Neill guided countering terror finance efforts, while in litigation he opposed North Korea’s funding of weapons of mass destruction. “As an international arbitrator,” he observed, “it’s a weighty responsibility when you are essentially judge, jury, and the appeals court, with your judgment enforceable in over 150 countries.” Today the EU includes him among a handful of Americans found suitable to chair sovereign trade arbitrations.
A longtime participant in the Democratic Party’s foreign and defense policy brain trust, he has provided advice for presidential candidates from the 1988 through 2020 elections. In 2004, for example, he chaired Senator Kerry’s foreign policy task force on relations with Arab and Islamic nations, as well as Lawyers for Kerry, recruiting thousands of lawyers for electoral law support in battleground states. His single biggest policy contribution, he said, came in 2020 when he proposed that the Biden campaign defense policy team back a crash spending program to develop technology-identifying pathogens before symptoms become manifest and speeding vaccine development to defend Americans from attack or nature. Congress subsequently appropriated over $50 billion to fund the program.
Making waves, though, has never been O’Neill’s goal. That’s true in his personal life, too. The former varsity baseball player lives 10 minutes from Walden Pond, where he kayaks. “I find balance there because exercise triggers my creativity and enhances clarity as I puzzle through issues.”
