Dr. John Duke Anthony is the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. He has also been a founder, board member, and Secretary of the U.S.-GCC Corporate Cooperation Committee; founding President of the Middle East Educational Trust; co-founder of the Commission on Israeli-Palestinian Peace; founding President of the Society for Gulf Arab Studies; co-founder and board member of the National Commission to Commemorate the 14th Centennial of Islam; founder of the Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference; and founder and former chairman of the U.S.-Morocco Affairs Council. For the past 35 years, Dr. Anthony has been a consultant and regular lecturer on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf for the Departments of Defense and State. From 1975-1988, he headed the Saudi Arabia Studies Program for American personnel assigned to the Saudi Arabia-U.S. Joint Commission for Economic Cooperation for the U.S. Department of Treasury. For nearly a decade, he taught courses on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf States at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has been a Visiting and Adjunct Professor at the Defense Intelligence College, the Woodrow Wilson School of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas, and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Since 1974, he has been Adjunct Professor at the Defense Institute for Security Management. In 2006, he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, where he developed and continues to teach a course for graduate students on "Politics of the Arabian Peninsula and GCC Countries," the first such academic semester-long course to be offered at any American university. In 2006 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Foreign Policy Association in Washington, D.C. In 2008 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo's HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin 'Abdalaziz Al-Sa'ud Center for American Studies.

In 1983, Dr. Anthony received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the U.S. Department of Defense's Institute for Security Assistance Management, one of two granted to American Middle East specialists in the Institute's history. In March 1989, the Kappa Alpha Order's National Executive bestowed upon him its Distinguished Public Service Award for Excellence "through a strenuous and useful Life of Service to others." In 1993, he received the U.S. Department of State's Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Award, one of three awarded over a span of 25 years in recognition of his preparation of American diplomatic and defense personnel assigned to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states. In 1994, he received the Stevens Award for Outstanding Contributions to American-Arab Understanding. On June 21, 2000, H.M. King Muhammad VI of Morocco, on the occasion of his first official visit to the United States, personally knighted Dr. Anthony, bestowing upon him the Medal of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite, the nation of Morocco's highest award for excellence. In May 2008, he was presented the first-ever Local Giants Leadership Award by the Rotary Club of the Nation's Capital.

A Member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1986, Dr. Anthony is a frequent participant in its study groups on issues relating to the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf regions and the broader Arab and Islamic world. He is the only American to have been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. In 1971, he was cosponsored by the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Department of State as the sole American scholar to observe at firsthand the process by which the British abrogated their century-plus obligations to administer the defense and foreign relations for nine Arab states lining the coastal regions of eastern Arabia and the Gulf. He is the only American to have served as an international observer in all four of Yemen's presidential and parliamentary elections and the only American to have been invited to each of the Gulf Cooperation Council's Ministerial and Heads of State Summits since the GCC's inception in 1981. (The GCC is comprised of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). Since 1986 and continuing until the present, Dr. Anthony has accompanied more than 200 Members of Congress, their chiefs of staff, defense and foreign affairs advisers, and legislative and communications directors on fact-finding missions to the Arab world. From 1996 until the present, he has also served as the principal scholar-escort for delegations to various GCC countries, Egypt, and Yemen comprised of more than 125 officers assigned to the staffs of the Combatant Commander, U.S. Central Command, including Generals J.H. B. Peay III, Anthony C. Zinni, Tommy Franks, John P. Abizaid, and Admiral William Fallon. He is the publisher of record for Saudi-U.S. Relations Information Services (SUSRIS), an electronic newsletter sent free of charge to more than 15,000 subscribers in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Anthony is the author of three books, the editor of a fourth, and has published more than 175 articles, essays, and monographs dealing with America's interests and involvement in the Arab countries, the Middle East, and the Islamic world. His best-known works are Arab States of the Lower Gulf: People, Politics, Petroleum; The Middle East: Oil, Politics, and Development (editor and co-author) and, together with J.E. Peterson, Historical and Cultural Dictionary of the Sultanate of Oman and the Emirates of Eastern Arabia. His most recent book, The United Arab Emirates: Dynamics of State Formation, was published in 2002.

Dr. Anthony holds a B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute, where he was elected president of his class all four years in addition to being elected president of the student body his senior year. He also earned a Master of Science in Foreign Service (With Distinction) from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he was one of three University Scholars and inducted into the National Political Science Honor Society, along with a Ph.D. in International Relations and Middle East Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he held a National Defense in Foreign Language Scholarship for Arabic and was appointed to the fulltime faculty in 1973 while still a student.