Dr. Nabeel Khoury was a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. His commentaries appear on the Atlantic Council’s MENASource blog, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, and on his own blog, Middle East Corner. 

After twenty-five years in the US Foreign Service, Khoury retired from the US Department of State in 2013 with the rank of minister counselor. He taught Middle East and US strategy courses at the National Defense University and Northwestern University. In his last overseas posting, Khoury served as deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Yemen (2004-2007). In 2003, during the Iraq war, he served as Department spokesperson at US Central Command in Doha and in Baghdad. 

Khoury earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the American University of Beirut and his master’s and PhD in political science from the State University of New York at Albany. Before his Foreign Service career, Khoury was an assistant professor of political science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, and earlier, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Jordan in Amman. Khoury has published articles on issues of leadership and development in the Arab world in The Middle East Journal, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and The International Journal of Middle East Studies. His book, Bunker Diplomacy: An Arab-American in the U.S. Foreign Service, was published in 2020.