Middle East Strategy at Harvard

Robert O. Freedman is Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone Professor of Political Science at Baltimore Hebrew University, and Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of four books on Soviet foreign policy, including Soviet Policy Toward the Middle East Since 1970, the third edition of which was published by Praeger Press in 1982, Moscow and the Middle East: Soviet Policy Since the Invasion of Afganistan, published by Cambridge University Press in 1991, and Soviet-Israeli Relations Under Gorbachev, published by Praeger in 1991. He is also the editor of 14 books on Israel and the Middle East, including Israel in the Begin Era (1982), Israel Under Rabin (1995), The Middle East and the Peace Process (1998), Israel’s First Fifty Years (2000) and The Middle East Enters the 21st Century (2002).

A past president of the Association for Israel Studies, Dr. Freedman has served as a commentator on National Public Radio, the BBC and the Voice of America, and is a consultant to the US State Department and the CIA. He has also been a member of US government delegations that went to Moscow and Beijing for discussions with Russian and Chinese scholars and government officials on the Middle East, and he led a US mission to Uzbekistan to discuss the establishment of US-Uzbek cultural relations. In 1989, Dr. Freedman was a member of a Brookings Institution delegation that went to Tunis for discussions with Palestinian leaders about the peace process. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he participated, as the American representative, in three conferences in Europe with European political leaders and scholars who dealt with the problem of improving US-European cooperation in the Middle East. Dr. Freedman has lectured to the Israeli Defense Ministry and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and recently appeared on the London-based Arab TV station Al-Mustakillah, where he discussed US policy in the Middle East and the prospects for democratization in the Arab world, with callers from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Iraq, Jordan and Tunisia. He has also held talks with Palestinian Authority Presidents Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni.

Dr. Freedman is currently completing a book on Russian foreign policy toward the Middle East since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and has begun work on a book on US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict in the second Bush Administration.

Dr. Freedman received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Diplomatic History and his MA and Ph.D degrees from Columbia University in the field of International Relations.

Posts by Robert O. Freedman