Steven Simon

Steven Simon is visiting professor of practice in Middle East Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington (Seattle). For the 2024-25 academic year he is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Initiative for Global Security at the Dickey Center. He will teach courses in the Government Department and Jewish Studies Program during the winter and spring terms.

Previously he was the Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in International Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 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 and 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 security-related 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 and the American Academy in Berlin.  He holds a BA from Columbia University in Classics and Near Eastern Languages, and master's degrees in theology (Harvard) and public policy (Princeton).

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), named a best book of 2023 by the New Yorker and Financial Times. 

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