Barbara Slavin

Barbara Slavin is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington and a lecturer in international affairs at George Washington University. Prior to joining Stimson, she founded and directed the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council and led a bi-partisan task force on Iran. The author of Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation (2007), she is a regular commentator on US foreign policy and Iran on NPR, PBS and C-Span.

A career journalist, Slavin served as a columnist for Al-Monitor; assistant managing editor for world and national security at the Washington Times; senior diplomatic reporter for USA Today; Cairo and Beijing correspondent for The Economist and as an editor at the New York Times Week in Review. She covered such key foreign policy issues as the US-led ‘war on terrorism,’ policy toward ‘rogue’ states, the Iran-Iraq war and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She has traveled to Iran nine times. Slavin also served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she wrote Bitter Friends, and as a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace, where she researched and wrote the report, Mullahs, Money and Militias: How Iran Exerts Its Influence in the Middle East.

Follow her on Twitter @barbaraslavin1.