Michael Rubin

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, where he focuses on Africa issues and the Middle East, and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. For the past decade, he has also worked as a contract Persian language analyst for the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office. 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.

He is the author of six books, several dozen book chapters, and is the author of more than two thousand opinion essays and articles in U.S. newspapers.