Thomas Lippman

Thomas W. Lippman is an award-winning author and journalist who has written about Middle Eastern affairs and American foreign policy for more than three decades, specializing in Saudi Arabian affairs, U.S.-Saudi relations, and relations between the West and Islam. He is a former Middle East bureau chief of the Washington Post, and also served as that newspaper's oil and energy reporter. Throughout the 1990s, he covered foreign policy and national security for the Washington Post, traveling frequently to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East. In 2003 he was the principal writer on the war in Iraq for Washingtonpost.com. Prior to his work in the Middle East, he covered the Vietnam war as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Saigon.

Lippman is the author of numerous magazine articles, book reviews and op-ed columns about Mideast affairs, and of five books: Understanding Islam (1982, 3d revised edition 2002); Egypt After Nasser (1989); Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy (2000); Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia (2004), and most recently Arabian Knight: Col.Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East (2008). Arabian Knight won a Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association as best biography of 2008.

Lippman is is also the author of the essay on Saudi Arabia's defense strategy and nuclear weapons policy published in 2004 by the Brookings Institution Press in The Nuclear Tipping Point, a book on global nuclear proliferation. In addition, he is currently a member of a study group on Saudi Arabia convened jointly by Princeton University and the Institute des Sciences Politiques in France.

A frequent television and radio commentator on Mideast developments, Lippman has appeared on NPR, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC and Fox News, and on radio stations in New York, Boston, Phoenix and San Francisco, as well as on television stations overseas. Several of his lectures on Saudi Arabia have been televised nationally by C-SPAN. In 2005 he was a lecturer on Middle Eastern affairs at the National Defense University and at the Brookings Institution, was a featured guest on two segments of the PBS program "Think Tank" and also appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show.” He has also been also a consultant to the producers of an A&E documentary on Middle East oil, to the U.S. Marine Corps , and to the National Counterterrorism Center.

In 2002, Lippman was a member of a task force on the future of the Balkans at the Council on Foreign Relations, of which he is a member; in 2004-2005, he was a member of the Council's study group on Saudi-U.S. relations. He is currently an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, where he is writing a new book on the future of Saudi Arabia.