Ronald D Asmus

Mr. Asmus made his name in a 1993 article published by Foreign Affairs that was among the first public calls for an expansion of NATO in the wake of the cold war. In 1997 Mr. Asmus joined the State Department as a deputy assistant secretary in the European bureau, where he played a leading role in making that expansion a reality. Ronald Dietrich Asmus was born in Milwaukee on June 29, 1957, the child of German immigrants whom he later described as fleeing “the aftermath of war and destruction.” While an undergraduate studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin, he visited Berlin to look for the house where his grandmother had lived during the 1930s, and found a city still in the grip of conflict. Upon returning home, he studied political science, earning a master’s degree in Soviet and Eastern European studies and a doctorate in European studies from Johns Hopkins University. In recent years, Mr. Asmus kept working to strengthen ties between America and Central Europe as head of the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think tank endowed by the German government in 1972 to foster trans-Atlantic cooperation. He is survived by his wife, Barbara Wilkinson; his son, Erik Asmus; his mother; and two brothers.