Prior to joining The Times, he was foreign editor of The Chicago Tribune. During his lengthy career as a foreign and national security correspondent, Mr. Shanker was The Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, from 1992-1995. Most of that time was spent covering the wars in Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Mr. Shanker was the first reporter to uncover and write about the Serb campaign of systematic mass rape of Muslim women. He also wrote about European integration, NATO policy, nuclear smuggling and the withdrawal of American, British, French and Russian troops from Berlin following the reunification of the German capital.

He was The Tribune's Moscow bureau chief from 1985-1988, covering the first years of the Gorbachev era as well as issues of superpower arms control. From 1988-1990, he was The Tribune's Pentagon correspondent. Mr. Shanker returned to Moscow from 1990-1992 to cover the death of the USSR and the collapse of the communist empire in Eastern Europe. He also spent one year as the foreign and military affairs writer on The Tribune editorial board.

Mr. Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Tufts University, specializing in strategic nuclear policy and international law, passing his master’s orals with Highest Honors. He graduated Cum Laude in political science from Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

He has written on foreign policy, military affairs and the intelligence community for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and the American Journalism Review. He is a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know,” an anthology published by Norton.