Dr. John Duke Anthony is the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. On June 21, 2000, H.M. King Muhammad VI of Morocco knighted Dr. Anthony, bestowing upon him the Medal of the Order of
Ouissam Alaouite, the nation of Morocco's highest award for excellence. Dr. Anthony currently serves on the United States Department of State Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy’s Subcommittee on Sanctions.
Dr. Anthony is 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, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates).
For the past 43 years, Dr. Anthony has also been a regular lecturer on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf for the Departments of Defense and State. He is former Chair, Near East and North Africa Program, Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State as well as former Founding Chair of the Department’s Advanced Arabian Peninsula Studies Seminar – the U.S. government’s leading educational preparation programs for select American diplomatic and defense personnel assigned to countries in Arabia and the Gulf, the one region to which the United States has mobilized and deployed more armed forces than any other place on three separate occasions in the past thirty-seven years.
A Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1986, Dr. Anthony has been a frequent participant in its study groups and seminars on issues relating to the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf regions, Syria, and the broader Arab and Islamic world. He has served as an Associate Professor, Visiting Professor, and/or Adjunct Professor at the American University in Cairo; Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service; the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies; the Universities of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Texas; the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School; the U.S. Joint Intelligence College; and the Virginia Military Institute. Dr. Anthony continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor at the Defense Institute of Security Cooperation Studies (formerly known as the Defense Institute of Security Assistance Management) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Dr. Anthony is the only American to have been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (1969-1970). Beginning in 1993 and continuing through 2006, his long experience in Yemen led to his being asked – consecutively by the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and the Government of Yemen – to serve as an international observer in each of Yemen’s first four presidential and parliamentary elections. In 1971, he was cosponsored by the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Department of State as the sole American scholar allowed to observe at firsthand the process by which Britain proceeded to abrogate its longstanding treaty obligations to administer the defense and foreign relations for nine Arab states lining the coastal regions of eastern Arabia and the Gulf.
Dr. Anthony's best-known works are Arab States of The Lower Gulf: People, Politics, Petroleum; The Middle East: Oil, Politics, and Development (editor and co-author); and, together with J. E. Peterson, Historical and Cultural Dictionary of The Sultanate of Oman and The Emirates of Eastern Arabia. He has also published more than 180 articles, essays, and monographs on a variety of topics related to the Arab region and specific Arab countries as well as America’s interests and involvement in the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Islamic world. For sixteen years, Dr. Anthony was the annual author of the essays on “Oman” and “Qatar” for the Encyclopedia Britannica Year in Review, the world’s oldest continuously published encyclopedia in English.
Dr. Anthony holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., where he held a National Defense in Foreign Language Scholarship for Arabic, was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, and was appointed to SAIS' full time faculty in 1973 while still a student.
On April 29, 2015, National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Founding President & CEO Dr. John Duke Anthony delivered the concluding keynote address at the 2015 Saudi-U.S. Healthcare Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The mission of the summit was to build, foster, and strengthen relationships between U.S. and Saudi Arabian healthcare providers and suppliers with a focus on the three tenets: (1) community – creating a global healthcare platform for exchanging “best practices;” (2) collaboration – promoting dialogue and growing existing relationships critical to “healthcare diplomacy;” and (3) commerce – facilitating new healthcare ventures and opportunities to stimulate “medical tourism.”