Douglas J. Feith

Douglas J. Feith is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. He works on a range of foreign and defense issues, writing and lecturing on such topics as terrorism, arms control, alliance relations, national security policy making and the relationship of policy and intelligence. His projects at Hudson have examined US policy toward East and South Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. He is writing a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mr. Feith served as under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 to August 2005. In that position, he helped devise the US government's strategy for the war on terrorism and contributed to policy for the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Feith's duties included managing the Defense Department's international relations and representing the Department in interagency policy making. War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, Mr. Feith's best-selling memoir of his Pentagon work on the war on terrorism, was published in 2008.

Mr. Feith helped plan the worldwide changes in the US defense posture, develop new US strategic partnerships with India and Pakistan, promote NATO enlargement and reform, and craft US policy toward China. Feith advised President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on the range of national security issues, including the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, the counter-insurgency in Colombia, and Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy.

Prior to this, Mr. Feith spent 15 years as the managing attorney of the Washington, DC law firm Feith & Zell, PC. In the Reagan administration, Mr. Feith worked at the White House as a Middle East specialist for the National Security Council and then served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for negotiations policy.

After each of his Pentagon tours, Mr. Feith received the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Defense Department's highest civilian award.

Mr. Feith's writings on foreign and defense affairs have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Commentary, the New Republic, and elsewhere. He has contributed chapters to a number of books, including Churchill as Peacemaker; Israel's Legitimacy in Law and History; and Hydra of Carnage: International Linkages of Terrorism.

Mr. Feith was a Belfer Center visiting scholar at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He held the position of professor and distinguished practitioner in national security policy at Georgetown University from 2006 to 2008, and was a distinguished visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He holds a JD (magna cum laude) from the Georgetown University Law Center and an AB (magna cum laude) from Harvard College.