Steven Simon is Professor of Practice in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies and senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Previously, he was the Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at MIT. He served as the NSC senior director for counterterrorism in the Clinton White House and for the Middle East and North Africa in the Obama White House and in senior positions at the Department of State. Outside of government, was senior advisor to Good Harbor LLC in Abu Dhabi and director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies office in Manama. Prior to this, he was deputy director of the IISS in London, managed security-related projects at RAND and was Hasib Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR.  He has taught at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Amherst and held fellowships at Brown, Oxford, and the American Academy in Berlin. 

He is the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror (Random House, 2004), winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for best book in international relations and of The Next Attack (Henry Holt, 2006), a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize, and one of the “best books of the year” in the Washington Post and Financial Times, which focused on the U.S. response to 9/11. He also co-authored Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change (Oxford, 2003); Building a Successful Palestinian State and The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State (RAND 2005); The Sixth Crisis (Oxford, 2010); The Pragmatic Superpower: The United States and the Middle East in the Cold War (W.W. Norton, 2016); Our Separate Ways (Public Affairs, 2016); and Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (Penguin/ Random House, April 2023). 

Mr. Simon has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico, New York Review of Books, Survival, and Haaretz, and has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, CNN and al Jazeera.