Great Decisions - Mona Yacoubian|American Foreign Policy in the Middle East

Analysts of American policy in 2025 have the unusual advantage of being able to assess the new president’s likely policies against the backdrop of what he did in his first term, four years earlier. The prognosis is not positive.

Join us for a timely discussion of this topic with Mona Yacoubian, senior adviser and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). This program will feature an expert presentation, live audience Q&A, and time for networking and discussion with other globally-oriented participants in the Newsfeed Café.

This program is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required.

Mona Yacoubian is senior adviser and director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She has more than thirty years of experience working on the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on conflict analysis, governance and stabilization challenges, and conflict prevention. She was previously vice president of the Middle East and North Africa Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), where she managed field programming in Iraq, Libya, and Tunisia as well as Washington, D.C.–based staff. In 2019, she served as executive director of the congressionally appointed Syria Study Group. From 2014 to 2017, Yacoubian served as deputy assistant administrator in the Middle East Bureau at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where she had responsibility for programming across Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. Prior to joining USAID, Yacoubian was a senior adviser at the Stimson Center and a special adviser on the Middle East at USIP. From 1990 to 1998, Yacoubian served as the North Africa analyst in the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Her opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and various other outlets, and she has testified to Congress six times. Yacoubian was a Fulbright scholar in Syria, where she studied Arabic at the University of Damascus from 1985 to 1986. She has held an international affairs fellowship with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and is a CFR member. She earned a master’s in public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor’s in public policy from Duke University.