Aramco Expats

NCUSAR Study Visit to Yemen Escort Dr. John Duke Anthony

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Author: National Council on US-Arab Relations
Released 21 April 2008

Dr. John Duke Anthony

Dr. John Duke Anthony
President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations

Dr. John Duke Anthony is the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations and is a founder, board member, and Secretary of the U.S.-GCC Corporate Cooperation Committee. He is also founding president of the Middle East Educational Trust, a founder of the Commission on Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the founding president of the Society for Gulf Arab Studies, a founder and board member of the National Commission to the 14th Centennial of Islam, founder of the Arab-U.S. Policymakers’ Conference, and founder and former chairman of the U.S. -Morocco Affairs.

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.  For nearly a decade, he taught courses on the Arabian Peninsula the Gulf States at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. From 1975-1988, he headed the Saudi Arabia Studies Program of Saudi Arabia-U.S. Joint Commission for Economic Cooperation for the U.S. Department of Treasury. He has been a Visiting and Adjunct Professor at the Defense Intelligence College, Management, the Woodrow Wilson 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 Defense Institute for Security Management of the U.S. Department of Defense. Since 2006, he has been Adjunct Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, where he has developed and taught course for graduate students on “Politics in the Arabian Peninsula,” 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.  More recently, he was appointed the 2008 Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Alwaleed Center for American Studies at the American University of Cairo.

In 1983, Dr. Anthony received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Institute for Security Assistance Management, one of two granted to 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 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 Islamic world. He is the only American ever to be awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. He is the only American to have served as an international observer in each of the parliamentary elections in Yemen and the only American as well as non-Arab 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).  Since 1986 and continuing until the present, Dr. Anthony has accompanied more than 200 Members of Congress, their chiefs of staff, defense and foreign affairs advisers, and legislative and communications directors on fact-finding missions to the Arab world.  From 1996 until the present, he has also served as the principal scholar-escort for delegations to various GCC countries and to Egypt comprised of more than 100 officers assigned to the staffs of the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command, including, respectively, Generals J.H. B. Peay III, Anthony C. Zinni, Tommy Franks, and John P. Abizaid.  He is the publisher of 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 and has published more than 200 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.

In 2005-2006, Dr. Anthony was the only Westerner scholar among 40 other specialists invited to contribute an essay, “The History of U.S.-GCC Relations,” to a volume marking the 25th anniversary of the Gulf Cooperation Council.  During the same period, he also authored the annual section on “U.S.-Gulf Relations” for the Gulf Yearbook, published by the Gulf Research Center; “King Abdallah’s First Year: A Personal Perspective,” for Al-Riyadh, and essays on Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar that appeared in international publications.  In addition to lecturing throughout the year on the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Affairs to specialist audiences throughout the United States, at the Departments of Defense and State, and to delegations of American educators and defense personnel traveling to Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, he also briefed American diplomatic and defense personnel at the National War College and the US Marine Corps War College; addressed the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies’ Seminar on Gulf Studies; participated as a specialist on the GCC countries at two international conferences on Gulf security sponsored by the Stanley Foundation; attended the Sixth Annual Doha Forum on Democracy, Development and Free Trade; addressed the Saudi Arabian Chapter of the International Young Presidents Organization; observed the annual GCC ministerial and heads of state summit in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh; served as an official observer for the presidential and parliamentary elections in Yemen; and was a keynote speaker at the International Axis for Peace Conference at the Residence Palace in Brussels, Belgium, where he delivered an address on, “Measuring the Perceived ‘Accomplishments’ of the Iraq War Aims through the Lens of Its Neo-Con Protagonists: A Preliminary Assessment.” In 2007-2008, he authored essays for the Encyclopedia Britannica’s annual yearbook on Oman and Qatar and a first-ever essay on “The Boom in the Gulf” as well as, for SUSRIS, his portion of a National Public Radio debate on “Arms and Diplomacy in the Gulf,” and “Gulf-U.S. Relations: Going Where?”   Additional publications may be accessed via the National Council's Web-site: http://www.ncusar.org/

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 student body his senior year.  He 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 only three University Scholars and was inducted into the National Political Science Honor Society. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  At SAIS, where he was appointed to the full-time faculty in 1973 while still a student, he held a National Defense in Foreign Language Scholarship for Arabic throughout his entire graduate studies program and was also granted America’s only Fulbright Fellowship to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY).  In 1969-1970 when he was the sole American allowed into the PDRY, which had broken diplomatic relations with the United States, he conducted field research on the role of the trade union movement in Aden Colony in the transformation from British colonial rule to national sovereignty. In 1971, he was cosponsored by the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Department of State as the sole American scholar assigned to observe the process by which the British abrogated their century-plus obligations to administer the defense and foreign relations for nine Arab states lining the coastal regions of eastern Arabia and the Gulf.

Dr. Anthony is married to the former Cynthia Burns McDonald, Director of Government Relations for the American University in Cairo. He is the father of twin sons, James Coleman Anthony II and John Burroughs Anthony.