Middle East Strategy at Harvard

Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a post he assumed in January 1993.

An expert on Arab and Islamic politics as well as U.S. Middle East policy, Dr. Satloff has written and spoken widely on the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Islamist challenge to the growth of democracy in the region, and the need for bold and innovative public diplomacy to Arabs and Muslims.

Soon after September 11, Dr. Satloff and his family moved to Rabat, capital of Morocco, where he telecommuted to Washington as the Institute’s director for policy and strategic planning, overseeing the organization’s major programs and research projects. In addition, he traveled throughout the Middle East and Europe and wrote extensively on ways to inject urgency and ideas into the ideological campaign against radical Islamism, the topic of his collection of essays, The Battle of Ideas in the War on Terror: Essays on U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Middle East (The Washington Institute, 2004).

During his two years abroad, Dr. Satloff’s personal research also focused on unearthing stories of Arab “heroes” and “villains” of the Holocaust, drawing on archives, interviews, and site visits in eleven countries. His discoveries, which helped convince the German government to award compensation to Jewish survivors of labor camps in North Africa, are the subject of a new book, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories of the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (PublicAffairs, 2006).

The author or editor of nine books and monographs, Dr. Satloff’s views on Middle East issues appear frequently in major newspapers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he regularly comments on major television network news programs, talk shows, and National Public Radio. In addition, Dr. Satloff is the creator and host of Dakhil Washington (Inside Washington), a weekly news and interview program on al-Hurra, the U.S. government-supported Arabic satellite television channel that beams throughout the Middle East and Europe. In that capacity, he is the only non-Arab to host a program on an Arab satellite channel.

Education: D.Phil., St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford; M.A., Harvard University; B.A., Duke University

Expertise: U.S. policy, public diplomacy, Arab and Islamic politics, Arab-Israeli relations, U.S.-Israel relations, peace process, Middle East democratization

Current Research: U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East, U.S. policy toward democratization and reform in the Middle East, U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islamists, Arab and inter-Arab politics

Languages: Arabic, French, Hebrew

Additional Publications:
• U.S. Policy toward Islamism (Council on Foreign Relations, 2000)
• From Abdullah to Hussein: Jordan in Transition (Oxford University Press, 1994)
• Troubles on the East Bank: Challenges to the Domestic Stability of Jordan (Praeger, 1986)

Posts by Robert Satloff