John P. Riordan is a career Foreign Service Officer in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Prior to serving as the Deputy Mission Director at USAID/Moldova, he was on assignment as a Development Advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida (2017-2020). Mr. Riordan was the USAID Country Director in Uzbekistan (2014-2017), where he served for multiple, extended periods of time as acting Deputy Chief of Mission. He was also USAID’s Country Director in Belarus (2009-2013). In both Belarus and Uzbekistan, Mr. Riordan pioneered the leveraging of Baltic partner expertise and regional knowledge in order to advance shared objectives. He was recognized in 2017 with a Diploma of Commendation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia for his decade contribution to fostering a close relationship between Latvia and the United States and in jointly providing support for Belarus and Central Asian countries.
Mr. Riordan was the USAID Development Advisor to the command group at Combined Joint Task Force 101 and 82 in Bagram, Afghanistan (2008-2009). Riordan served two assignments in Iraq (2006 & 2008, respectively) as the Deputy Director of USAID's Governance and Provincial Reconstruction Team Office during the U.S. Government “surge,” and then helped to launch the Joint Interagency Task Force at Multi-National Forces-Iraq. He also served at the Agency's mission in Romania (2005-2006). Mr. Riordan was honored to be the first Foreign Service Officer selected for an academic year in the Advanced Military Studies Program at the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas (2007- 2008). While there, Mr. Riordan produced a monograph, Red D.I.M.E., which drew on original research on the Basmachi Resistance Movement against the fledgling Bolshevik forces of the Soviet Union in the Ferghana Valley region of Central Asia in order to apply historical and political lessons to irregular warfare in complex, adaptive environments.
Before joining USAID, Riordan lived and worked in the Ferghana Valley region of Central Asia. He lectured at Ferghana State University and was the first American to conduct research in the Ferghana City archives as a Fulbright scholar in Uzbekistan; he also collected oral histories of Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Tajik World War II veterans in order to better understand the formation of Soviet identity in Central Asia (2002-2003). He was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ferghana Valley region of Kyrgyzstan (1998-2000), and worked as the Office Director of the State Department funded Freedom Support Act/Future Leader Exchange Program (FSA/FLEX) in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (2000-2001).
Riordan earned a master's in military arts and sciences from the School of Advanced Military Studies at the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., and a master's in Russian, East European, and Central Asian studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.