Daniel Benjamin

Since before the first al Qaeda attacks against American embassies in East Africa to the present day, Daniel Benjamin has been involved in America’s efforts to combat contemporary terrorism. As the longest-serving ambassador-at-large and chief of the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau and a White House counterterrorism official in the 1990s, Benjamin has been intimately involved in crafting the strategies that have weakened the world’s most formidable terrorist threat. Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations book award for The Age of Sacred Terror—a New York Times Notable Book—Benjamin provides a global perspective on the changing terrorist threat. He describes how the al Qaeda core in Pakistan has been crippled, and gauges the threats that have evolved in Yemen, Iraq and various parts of Africa. He examines the problem of Iran, the world’s foremost sponsor of terror, and its partner Lebanese Hezbollah. He describes how the Arab Spring has transformed the security landscape and the approaches we need to take to lock in the security gains of recent years. He also looks over the horizon at the long-term danger posed by the conflict in Syria and the sectarian strife now reshaping the Middle East and Persian Gulf.