Faculty Directory

Background and Education

A Middle East scholar, foreign policy adviser and commentator on international relations whose most recent book, The Dispensable Nation, deals with the implications of Obama administration’s foreign policy on American strategic interests. His earlier books, Forces of Fortune and The Shia Revival, examined the postwar sectarian violence in Iraq and the uprisings known as the Arab Spring and contributed to U.S. policy formulated in response to those events; prior to being named SAIS dean, was a professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; from 2009 to 2011, was special adviser to the president's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; served on the faculties of the Naval Postgraduate School, Stanford University, the University of California, San Diego and the University of San Diego; was a Carnegie Scholar and a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; currently a member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, and a director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the National Democratic Institute; is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations; Ph.D., political science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology