Michael Rubin

MICHAEL RUBIN is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School, and senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Between 2002 and 2004, Rubin worked as a staff advisor for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, in which capacity he was seconded to Iraq. Between 2004 and 2009, he was chief editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Rubin received a B.S. degree in biology from Yale University in 1994, and a Ph.D. in history from the same institution in 1999. He has previously worked as a lecturer in Iranian history at Yale University; Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC; and at three different universities in northern Iraq. Rubin currently teaches seminars about Iran, terrorism, and the Middle East onboard deploying U.S. aircraft carriers and amphibious ready groups, and to the FBI regarding Islamist terrorism and other law enforcement issues arising out of the Middle East. He has lived and conducted research in Yemen, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and with the Taliban in Afghanistan pre-9/11.

Rubin is author most recently of Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engagement (Encounter, 2014), a history of a half-century of American diplomacy with rogue regimes and terrorist groups, The Shi’ites of the Middle East (AEI, 2014) and two earlier books examining Iranian history.

Rubin currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife Anna Borshchevskaya, and their daughter and son.