Ed Husain

Senior Fellow

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Ed Husain is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) focused on U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East generally, and specifically at the intersection of Arab-Israeli relations after the Abraham Accords, the geopolitical interplay of Arab Gulf states, China-Muslim world dynamics, and Islamist terrorism. He is a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he teaches classes on global security, Arab-Israeli peace, and the shared intellectual roots of the West and Islam.

In his recent tenure as director of the N7 Initiative from 2023 to 2024—a strategic partnership between the Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation and the Atlantic Council—Dr. Husain led an international summit in Tel Aviv that convened a high-level gathering of Arab, Muslim, and Israeli government ministers, financiers, and global leaders.

Husain was a senior adviser to former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2014 to 2017. Thereafter, he worked with several European and Middle Eastern governments on counterterrorism issues. Between 2010 and 2014, he was a senior fellow at CFR where his policy innovation memorandum led to the creation of a Geneva-based global fund to combat political violence. He is the author of several widely acclaimed books, including The Islamist, House of Islam, and Among the Mosques. His writing has been published widely in the global press, including in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the BBC, and others. 

Dr. Husain brings extensive experience from the Middle East, having lived for several years in Damascus, Syria, Jeddah, and Saudi Arabia, and travelled widely from Morocco to Oman. He speaks Arabic. 

He has a bachelor’s degree (Hons.) in history and a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies, both from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), at the University of London. His doctoral thesis, which refuted the “clash of civilizations” theory, was supervised by the eminent English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton at the University of Buckingham.

Dr. Husain is author of several widely-acclaimed books, The Islamist (2007), House of Islam (2018), and Among the Mosques (2021). His writings have been published widely in the global press, including in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, and others.  

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.