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Jared Andrew Cohen (born November 24, 1981) is an American businessman and presidential historian serving as the President of Global Affairs and co-head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute at Goldman Sachs, which he joined in August 2022 as a Partner and member of the firm's Management Committee. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he was the founder and the CEO of Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas). Prior to that, he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and as an advisor to Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton. Brought in by Condoleezza Rice as a member of the Policy Planning Staff, he was one of a few staffers that stayed under Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, he focused on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Internet freedom, and fostering opposition in repressive countries.
According to The New York Times Magazine, right before his departure Cohen was one of the architects of what was labeled in 2010 as "21st century statecraft" along with Richard Boly and several foreign service officers in the Department of State's Office of eDiplomacy In 2013, Cohen was named by Time as one of its 100 most influential people.
Cohen was one of the few members of Policy Planning kept on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He played a role in helping shape counter-radicalization strategies and advised on US policy towards Iran and the Middle East. Beginning in April 2009, Cohen aided delegations focused on connecting technology executives with local stakeholders in Iraq, Russia, Mexico, Congo, and Syria.
In the midst of the June 2009 protests in Iran, Cohen sought to support the opposition in Iran. He contacted Twitter, requesting that the company not perform planned maintenance that would have temporarily shut down service in Iran, because the protestors were using Twitter to maintain contact with the outside world. According to The New Yorker Ryan Lizza, "The move violated Obama's rule of non-interference, and White House officials were furious." In an interview with Clinton, she "did not betray any disagreement with the President over Iran policy," but "cited Cohen's move with pride."
While serving on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen became an advisor to Richard Holbrooke, who was the first Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He took several trips with Holbrooke to Afghanistan, where he helped develop some of the early strategic communications strategies.
Cohen was among the early adopters of social media in the U.S. government. In April 2010, Cohen had the third largest number of Twitter followers in the US government, behind Barack Obama and John McCain. By September 2013, he was no longer in the top 20.
According to a Fast Company article, "Jigsaw’s employees are a mix of engineers and researchers, who have built out a portfolio of more than a dozen products."
Wired wrote that "The New York–based think tank and tech incubator aims to build products that use Google's massive infrastructure and engineering muscle not to advance the best possibilities of the Internet but to fix the worst of it: surveillance, extremist indoctrination, censorship."
According to a 2019 Vice Motherboard report, "Current and former Jigsaw employees describe a toxic workplace environment, mismanagement, poor leadership, HR complaints that haven't resulted in action, retaliation against employees who speak up, and a chronic failure to retain talent, particularly women engineers and researchers. Sources describe a place full of well-intentioned people who are undermined by their own leaders; an organization that, despite the breathless headlines it has garnered, has done little to actually make the internet any better."
In June 2022, Cohen addressed the UN Security Council, warning that Russian cyberattacks, disinformation and other forms of information warfare being waged in Ukraine are a “crystal ball” for future problems elsewhere. He called for states to "find a way to turn the volume down and settle on some kind of deterrence doctrine for the cyber domain."
In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton's team Cohen reportedly sent to Clinton said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”
On October 22, 2022, Cohen traveled to Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This visit was the first in-person meeting between the President and the U.S. financial sector since the war began on February 24 that year. "Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with representatives of Goldman Sachs investment company"
Historian Richard Norton Smith, in his Wall Street Journal review of the book, wrote, "Mr. Cohen shows himself to be a gifted artist in his own right. If some chapters of Life After Power suggest anthologized history, his postpresidential portraits of Mr. Carter and, especially, Mr. Bush, make this book that rarity—a highly readable sequel that confirms the promise of the author’s earlier work."
Julian Assange wrote critically of the book:
Another critical review by Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic stated:
His second book, Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East, was published by Penguin Books (Gotham) in October 2007 and has also been published as an audio book and translated into Dutch and Italian.
He and co-author Eric Schmidt published "The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution" in the Wall Street Journal in 2013, and a 2012 article for The Washington Post, entitled "Technology Can Be Harnessed to Fight Drug Cartels in Mexico," which grew out of a trip the two took to Ciudad Juárez.
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