Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin

Senior Fellow

American Enterprise Institute, United States

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC and a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Rubin has, for the past decade, also worked as a contract Persian language analyst for the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office. 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. Between 2007 and 2021, Rubin was a senior lecturer in National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, during which time he spent more than a year at sea teaching courses related to the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Aden littoral states for deployed carrier strike groups and amphibious assault groups.

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. He contributed affidavits to or served as an expert witness in court cases involving Hezbollah money laundering, Iranian terrorism, and internal Iraqi security.

Rubin is co-editor (with Brian Katulis) of Seven Pillars: What Really Causes Instability in the Middle East? (AEI, 2019), author of Kurdistan Rising? (AEI, 2016), Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engagement (Encounter, 2015), 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. In addition, Rubin is the author of more than two thousand opinion essays and articles in U.S. newspapers, has testified in Congress on more than a dozen occasions, and is the author of several dozen book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and peer-reviewed policy articles.

Rubin lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Russia analyst Dr. Anna Borshchevskaya and their two children, ages 11 and 8.

Follow Rubin on twitter: @mrubin1971