Steven Simon Keynote Speaker

Steven Simon is a Distinguished Fellow and Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. He went to Dartmouth following a professorship in Middle Eastern Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Previously, he was the Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in International Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In government, he served as the National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism in the Clinton White House and for the Middle East and North Africa in the Obama White House as well as in senior positions at the U.S. Department of State. Outside of government, he was a principal and senior advisor to Good Harbor LLC in Abu Dhabi and director of the Middle East office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Manama. Prior to this, he was deputy director of the IISS in London. He managed classified projects at the RAND Corporation and was the Hasib Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught at Princeton, Dartmouth, Colby, and Amherst and held fellowships at Brown, Oxford, Dartmouth 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), which the Financial Times reviewed as “brilliantly written,” Foreign Affairs judged “magisterial,” The Washington Post described as “essential” and New Yorker magazine listed as a notable book of 2023. Mr. Simon has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico, New York Review of Books, Survival, The Atlantic, The Economist, and Haaretz, and has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, CNN, ABCNews and al Jazeera.