Joseph Edward Nation (born July 18, 1956) is an American politician and academic. He graduated from the University of Colorado with a B.A. in Economics, German and French. While he was a Pan Am flight attendant, he studied at Georgetown University under Madeleine Albright as a Fellow in Science, Technology, and Diplomacy while earning a Masters in Foreign Service. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the RAND Graduate School and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, where he conducted research on defense conversion and wrote a book, The De-Escalation of Nuclear Crises.