Confronting the New Face of Terror

February 20, 2017
Steven Simon
Steven Simon, MTS '77

Steven Simon’s warning in the January 4, 2000, edition of the New York Times was like cold water in the face of Americans still bleary-eyed from partying like it was 1999.

Simon, fresh from a counterterrorism assignment in the Clinton White House, and his National Security Council colleague Daniel Benjamin wrote of a new combination of “religious motivation and the desire to inflict catastrophic damage,” among extremists in the Middle East. This movement, they predicted, would only “grow and persist” even if its then little-known leader Osama bin Laden were arrested immediately. When Simon and Benjamin’s words proved prophetic on September 11, 2001, it illustrated the importance of religious knowledge—and the consequences of its absence—in national security and foreign policy circles.

“Social science tended to derogate or deride the importance of religion,” he says. “People in government just didn’t think in those terms.”

Simon, MTS ’77, is part of a group of Harvard Divinity School alumni helping to shape U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy at the highest levels. He came to the U.S. Department of State and then the White House at a time when modernization and secularization theory were still the dominant ways of understanding the Middle East. These held that religion was obsolete and that the “new Middle Eastern man”—technocratic, military, left-leaning—would lead his country to secularism and economic development. On academic leave at Oxford after the first Gulf War, Simon studied Salafist literature and considered its implications for Middle Eastern politics.

The Islamic revivalism of the late twentieth century made it difficult for analysts to ignore religion as a force shaping popular consciousness throughout the region. Simon says that his HDS experience put him at the vanguard of a new group of diplomats looking to integrate an understanding of religion into U.S. foreign policy.

“After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Clinton administration decided that they needed to have somebody working full time on counterterrorism,” Simon explains. “They pulled me by the collar and put me in that job. I and certain colleagues in the CIA were very tuned in to the evolving role of religion in Middle Eastern politics. I was sensitized to it precisely because of my background at HDS. That’s 100 percent the reason.”

Ehud Barak, Barack Obama, and Steve Simon
From left: Ehud Barak, Barack Obama, and Steve Simon


As senior director of transnational threats at the National Security Council, Simon took note of troubling developments in the Middle East. Authoritarian regimes repressed political speech, only to see it go underground and resurface as religious expression.

“There was a revival of Islam, which really took off as the previous model of development began to show its bankruptcy,” he says. “The mosque became the only place to express dissent because these regimes were all very repressive, for the sake of survival. Osama bin Laden was an exemplar of this sort of revivalism.”

Simon left the administration in 1999, but sought to return to service after the September 11 attacks. Unfortunately, the partisan divide in Washington left no place for someone who had served in a Democratic White House. Simon became the deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, where he sought to exert influence through his writing and scholarship. He collaborated again with Daniel Benjamin on The Age of Sacred Terror, which traced the roots of Salafi jihadism back to medieval times. The book won the 2004 Arthur Ross Award from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

After stints at the CFR and the RAND Corporation, Simon got the call from the White House once more in the early years of the Obama administration. His second tour on the National Security Council came at a time of profound change. As the staffer in charge of North Africa and the Middle East, Simon dealt with the revolutions of the Arab Spring, military intervention in Syria, the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, and crises between Turkey and Israel. Always in the background of all were negotiations on what would ecome the administration’s most significant foreign policy achievement: a nuclear deal with Iran.

“The security cabinet meets all the time, so you help prepare the national security advisor and the president,” Simon says. “I staffed 40 cabinet meetings on just my countries, and 80 subcabinet meetings in the White House. I traveled with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Clinton and, among other things, staffed President Obama’s weekly calls to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a whirlwind of activity.”

Simon left the Obama Administration in 2012 to become executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Middle East office, then returned to academia. First at Dartmouth and now at Amherst College, he teaches courses on Middle Eastern history, political economy, intelligence, and policy. In June, Simon published Our Separate Ways, a book about one of the most emotionally charged issues in U.S. foreign policy: the U.S.-Israel relationship. In it, he contends that rapid demographic, political, and social changes for both countries have led to the emergence of important strategic differences. To save the relationship, he says it must be “reconsecrated.”

“There is, in its origins, a kind of covenant between the United States and Israel,” he says. “It originated in sacrifice, profound on the Jewish side, but there was also the United States, which destroyed Nazi Germany and then facilitated the creation of the State of Israel. If we care about that relationship, then the simple step is to restore it, or as I put it, ‘reconsecrate’ it. Our Separate Ways puts forward some ideas for doing that.”

Simon is now working on a new book, “The Long Goodbye: The United States and Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring.” He says that there’s been a sea change in the way that those in the Foreign Service think about religion. “At this point, everybody understands the powerfully motivating role of religion,” he says. “That’s really sunk in.” Looking to the future, though, Simon says that it’s critical for policy makers to understand not only the religious overtones of conflict, but also their historical, economic, and political context. Only then can they have a complete picture of the strategic landscape.

“It’s sort of like the Thirty Years’ War,” he says. “Religion was a huge component of that, but at the end of the day, the negotiation wasn’t only about religion. It was about how to deal with each other’s interests, stop fighting, and create a durable peace.”

—by Paul Massari