Haass was born in New York City in 1951. After graduating from Oberlin College, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in 1978. The next year he began his career in government, working briefly for the US Department of Defense before moving to the Department of State. During the presidency of George H. W. Bush, he was special assistant to the president and a National Security Council Director for Near East and South Asian affairs. For the first three years of the George W. Bush administration, he was both director of policy planning for the State Department, where he worked closely with Secretary of State Colin Powell, and special envoy to Northern Ireland, working on the peace program. In 2003, he became president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a position he still held as of 2021.

Haass has been a faculty member of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and advised presidential candidates from both the Republican and the Democratic Party. He has written 14 books on foreign policy, including Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A

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