The Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel, America, and the Rumors of War

SPEAKER BIOS

Steven Simon is adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Goldman Sachs visiting professor in public policy at Princeton University. Prior to joining CFR, Mr. Simon specialized in Middle Eastern affairs at the RAND Corporation. He came to RAND from London, where he was the deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and Carol Deane senior fellow in U.S. security studies. Before moving to Britain in 1999, Mr. Simon served at the White House for over five years as director for global issues and senior director for transnational threats. During this period, he was involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia. These assignments followed a fifteen year career at! the U.S. Department of State.

Mr. Simon has published in Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Times, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Survival, the National Interest, World Policy Journal, and other journals. He is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC, ABC, 60 Minutes, Nightline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Fox, and NPR.

Mr. Simon is the coauthor, with Dana Allin, of The Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel, America, and the Rumors of War (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is the author of a February 2007 Council Special Report “After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq.” He is the coauthor of The Age of Sacred Terror (Random House, 2002), which won the Council on Foreign Relations 2004 Arthur Ross Book Award, and coeditor of Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change (Oxford University Press/IISS, 2003). He is also the coauthor of Building a Successful Palestinian State (Rand Corporation, 2005) and The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State (Rand Corporation, 2005). Most recently, he coauthored The Next Attack (Henry Holt, 2005), which examine! s the evolution of the jihad since September 11, 2001, and America’s response, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2006. He is working on a new book, with Daniel Benjamin, on Muslim integration in Europe.

Mr. Simon has a BA from Columbia University in classics and Near Eastern languages, an MTS from the Harvard Divinity School, and an MPA from Princeton University. He was a university fellow at Brown University and an international affairs fellow at Oxford University.