Dr. John Duke Anthony is the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations; founder of the Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conferences; founding President of the Middle East Educational Trust, co-founder and first President of the Society for Gulf Arab Studies; and a co-founder and Board Member of the National Commission to Commemorate the 14th Centennial of Islam. For the past 34 years, Dr. Anthony has been a consultant and regular lecturer on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf for the Departments of Defense and State. In the mid-1970s, he served as Chairman of the Near East and North Africa Program at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. In the early 1980s, he was the founding Chairman of the Department’s Advanced Arabian Peninsula Studies Seminar; from 1975-1988, he was Chairman of the Saudi Arabia Studies Program for American personnel assigned to the Saudi Arabia-U.S. Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation for the U.S. Department of Treasury. In 1986, he was the founding Secretary of the U.S.-GCC Corporate Cooperation Committee. For nearly a decade, he taught courses on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf States at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. He has been a Visiting and Adjunct Professor at the Defense Intelligence College, the Woodrow Wilson School of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas, and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Since 1974, he has been Adjunct Professor at the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Institute for Security Management. From 2006 to the present, he has served as Adjunct Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, where he developed and has continued to teach a course for graduate students on “Saudi Arabia and Gulf Politics,” the first such academic semester-long course to be offered at any American university. Also in 2006, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Foreign Policy Association in Washington, D.C. In 2007, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the Yemen College for Middle Eastern Studies.

In 1983, Dr. Anthony received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Institute for Security Assistance Management, one of three granted to American Middle East specialists in the Institute’s history. In 1993, he received the U.S. Department of State’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Award, one of three awarded over a span of 25 years in recognition of his preparation of American diplomatic and defense personnel assigned to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states. In 1994, he received the Stevens Award for Outstanding Contributions to American-Arab Understanding. On June 21, 2000, H.M. King Muhammad VI of Morocco, on the occasion of his first official visit to the United States, personally knighted Dr. Anthony, bestowing upon him the Medal of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite, the nation of Morocco’s highest award for excellence.

A Member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1986, Dr. Anthony is a frequent participant in its study groups on issues relating to the Gulf region and the broader Arab and Islamic world. He is the only American ever to have been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in the former People’s Democratics Republic of Yemen. He is also the only American to have served as an international observer in all four of Yemen’s presidential and parliamentary elections and the only American to have been invited to each of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Ministerial and Heads of State Summits since the GCC’s inception in 1981. (The GCC is comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). He is the publisher of record for Saudi-U.S. Relations Information Services (SUSRIS), an electronic newsletter sent free of charge to more than 15,000 subscribers in the United States and elsewhere. Dr. Anthony is the author of three books, the editor of a fourth, and has published more than 150 articles, essays, and monographs dealing with America’s interests and involvement in the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Islamic world. His best-known works are Arab States of the Lower Gulf: People, Politics, Petroleum; The Middle East: Oil, Politics, and Petroleum (editor and co-author) and, together with J.E. Peterson, The Emirates of Eastern Arabia and the Sultanate of Oman. His most recent book, The United Arab Emirates: Dynamics of State Formation, was published in 2002.

Dr. Anthony holds a B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute, where he was elected president of his class all four years and president of the Corps of Cadets his senior year; earned a Master of Science in Foreign Service (With Distinction) from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he was one of three University Scholars and was inducted into the National Political Science Honor Society; and obtained a PhD in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. At SAIS, where he was appointed to the fulltime faculty in 1973 while he was still a student, he held a National Defense in Foreign Language Scholarship for Arabic. In 1971, he was cosponsored by the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Department of State as the sole American scholar to observe at firsthand the process by which Great Britain abrogated its century-plus obligations to administer the defense and foreign relations for nine Arab states lining the coastal regions of eastern Arabia and the Gulf.

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