Jon B. Alterman is the senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of its Middle East program since 2002. He is also the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy. As a Council on Foreign Relations fellow early in the George W. Bush administration, he was member of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and special assistant to the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. In 2006, he served as an expert adviser to the Iraq Study Group, known as the Baker-Hamilton Commission. Before that, he was a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. From 1993 to 1997, he was an award-winning teacher at Harvard University. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other major publications. He is a member of the editorial advisory board of Arab Media and Society. Recently, he coauthored a CSIS report entitled “Citizens in Training: Conscription and Nation-building in the United Arab Emirates.”