Dr. John Duke Anthony is the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations, and currently serves on the United States Department of State Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy and its 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, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). For the past 39 years, he has been a consultant and regular lecturer on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf for the Departments of Defense and State.
A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1986, Dr. Anthony has been a frequent participant in its study groups on issues relating to Syria, the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf regions, and the broader Arab and Islamic world. On June 22, 2000, on occasion of his first official state visit to the United States since succeeding his late father, 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.
In addition to heading the National Council, consulting, lecturing, and serving as an Adjunct Faculty Member of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Institute for Security Assistance Management (DISAM) since 1974, Dr. Anthony served as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies from 2006-2011.
Dr. Anthony is the author of three books, the editor of a fourth, and more than 175 articles, essays, and monographs dealing with America’s interests and involvement in the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Islamic world.
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. For nearly a decade, Dr. Anthony taught courses on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf States at SAIS. 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, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and a regular lecturer at the National War College.
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.”