Jean-David Levitte
Jean-David Levitte is Senior Policy Advisor at Rock Creek Global Advisors, where he focuses on European policy issues and foreign relations. Ambassador Levitte is currently advising multinational companies and financial institutions on developments in the Eurozone, transatlantic trade negotiations, and matters arising in the G7 and G20.
Ambassador Levitte has had a distinguished and outstanding career in the French Foreign Service, serving on the staff of three French Presidents and holding various senior positions in the French Foreign Service.
Most recently, he served as Senior Diplomatic Adviser and Sherpa to President Sarkozy from 2007-2012.
Previously, he served as Ambassador to the United States from 2002 to 2007 and as the French Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2000-2002.
Ambassador Levitte also served as Senior Diplomatic Adviser and Sherpa of President Chirac from 1995 to 2000. From 1990, he held senior positions in the French Foreign Ministry, first as Assistant Secretary for Asia and then as Undersecretary for Cultural and Scientific Cooperation. In 1988, he was designated as Ambassador to the GATT, WIPO, and United Nations organizations in Geneva, serving from 1988 to 1990.
Before 1988 Ambassador Levitte was assigned as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Foreign Minister, a position he held from 1986 to 1988. Prior to that, Ambassador Levitte was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary in the African Bureau after serving in the United States as Second Counselor at the Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations in New York.
Ambassador Levitte joined the Foreign Service in 1970. He was first posted in Hong Kong and Beijing in the early 1970s. A few months after his election in 1974, President Valery Giscard d’Estaing asked him to work on his staff at the Elysee Palace, where he stayed from 1975 to 1981.
Born in 1946 in the south of France, Ambassador Levitte earned a law degree and is a graduate of the Paris Institute for Political Science (Sciences Po) and of the National School of Oriental Languages, where he studied Chinese and Indonesian.
Ambassador Levitte is married to Marie-Cécile Jonas and has two daughters and three grandchildren.