Ross, Dennis 1948- (Dennis B. Ross)

PERSONAL:

Born November 26, 1948, in San Francisco, CA; married; children: three. Education: University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D., 1970.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1828 L St. N.W., Ste. 1050, Washington, DC 20036. E-mail—dennisr@washingtoninstitute.org.

CAREER:

Pentagon, Washington, DC, deputy director of the Office of Net Assessment, 1982-84; Berkeley-Stanford program on Soviet international behavior, executive director, 1984-1986; National Security Council, Washington, DC, director of Near East and South Asian Affairs, 1986-88; U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, director of policy planning, 1988-92, Middle East coordinator, 1997-2001; Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC, counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow. Fox News Channel, foreign affairs analyst.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Presidential Medal for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, presented by President Clinton; U.S. State Department award; medal and Alumnus of the Year designation, University of California, Los Angeles; honorary doctoral degrees from Amherst College, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Syracuse University.

WRITINGS:

1999 Soref Symposium: The Barak Victory: Implications for Israel, the Peace Process, and U.S. Policy: With a Keynote Address by Dennis Ross: June 17-18, 1999, the Park Hyatt Hotel, Washington, DC (paper), Washington Institute for Near East Policy (Washington, DC), 1999.

The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2004.

Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of foreword to Al-Qaeda's Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups & the Next Generation of Terror, by Jonathan Schanzer, Specialist Press International (New York, NY), 2005; contributor to periodicals, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, National Interest, Washington Quarterly, Foreign Policy, World Politics, Orbis, International Security, Survival, and Journal of Strategic Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Dennis Ross is a former diplomat who was the key negotiator in the Middle East peace process during the administrations of Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton, a period during which he worked with Secretaries of State James Baker, Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright. Ross accompanied Clinton to the Wye River summit in 1998, and to the Camp David summit in 2000. He was director of policy planning during the Bush administration, and as such, he was instrumental in forming United States policy toward the former Soviet Union. His other accomplishments during that period include his role in the unification of Germany, negotiations on arms control, and the Gulf War coalition that was formed in 1991. Ross was also involved in the 1995 Interim Agreement of the Israelis and the Palestinians, and he brokered the 1997 Hebron Accord, facilitated the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994, and worked to mediate relations between Syria and Israel. Ross served during the term of President Ronald Reagan on the staff of the National Security Council as director of Near East and South Asian Affairs and deputy director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. Ross, who graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1970, and who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Soviet decision making, served as the executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford program on Soviet international behavior. After leaving the State Department, Ross became counselor and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace is a detailed account of Ross's twelve years as a special envoy to the Middle East under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Booklist reviewer Jay Freeman wrote that Ross "provides a masterful, riveting, and scrupulously fair account of a process that now seems like a noble failure." Ross follows the peace process from the first talks in Madrid to the collapse of negotiations at Camp David and beyond. Many of the details contained in the volume were unreported at the time, and Ross comments on errors of judgment and failures, both his own and those of others involved. Ross did experience success, however. He helped to mediate four provisional agreements, including one that resulted in the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank. At a 2000 Geneva summit, he was able to convince Israel and Syria to reveal their acceptable compromises regarding the Golan Heights.

In a Washington Monthly review, Dan Ephron noted that Ross was raised by a Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather in a nonreligious household. As a young man he worked on the campaigns of Robert Kennedy and George McGovern and became more aware of the Middle East situation after the 1967 war. In the book Ross writes that he believed that the Jewish people have a right to a homeland but that the building of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza was wrong. Over the years Ross was criticized for having a Jewish bias, and at the same time for not fully supporting Israel.

Ross's Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World is a study of the necessity of diplomacy, forethought, subtlety, objectivity, and concentration in foreign affairs, qualities that he writes have been missing from the George W. Bush administration, which he contends follows a policy formed on ideology and wishful thinking. Ross cites Iraq as an example of failed statecraft and includes case studies about American diplomacy that include the reunification of Germany, Serbian aggression in the Balkans, and the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. In an article and interview posted on the Boston Globe Online, Harvey Blume wrote: "Statecraft, as Ross explains it, is like chess: It calls for the application of varied forms of power and pressure to complex situations across a wide board. Like chess, it requires a cool appraisal of one's assets and one's opponents' vulnerabilities—plus, as Ross told me last week, an ‘ability to always be thinking three moves ahead.’"

Ross wrote this book for the 2008 presidential candidates, the general public, and the media, which he charges with asking the appropriate questions of the candidates. Ross explains the varying degrees of the success of statecraft by recounting his meetings with major world leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Eduard Shevardnadze. On the subject of the second Bush administration, he told Blume: "Originally I was going to write the book only about negotiation and mediation, but the more I saw what was happening in foreign policy, the more concerned I became that the problem wasn't just about the formulation of goals, but also about inept implementation. There was always a fundamental gap between objectives and means in the Bush administration, a lack of understanding of how to exercise leverage—how to recognize where we had it, how to build it, how to recognize the vulnerabilities of those whose policies we wished to change."

Ross told Blume that he was conditionally in favor of the war in Iraq, but that he now favored containment. Blume asked him to define his definition of neoliberal, a term by which he defines himself. "Neoliberalism means that we have to be engaged in the world and that force is an instrument that has to be used at times," replied Ross. "But unlike neoconservatives, neoliberals are much less optimistic that the military instrument—a blunt instrument that creates all sorts of uncertainties over time—can be an agent of political transformation. Neoliberalism doesn't give up ambition or concern about what goes on inside other states. But we look at and use all the other instruments of power to try and influence behavior."

New York Times Book Review contributor Jacob Heilbrunn described Statecraft as being "an important and illuminating book…. Ross's most censorious remarks are reserved for the administration's disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ross believes Arab antipathy toward America has been greatly heightened by the perception that Bush is ‘indifferent to a conflict that animated a basic grievance among those in the Arab and Islamic worlds.’ As Ross sees it, while nothing America did could by itself have permanently ended the conflict, the Bush administration remained recklessly aloof. Coupled with the fiasco in Iraq, America undermined its own security by inadvertently becoming Al Qaeda's best recruiting agent."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Prospect, October, 2004, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, review of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, p. 44.

Booklist, June 1, 2004, Jay Freeman, review of The Missing Peace, p. 1690; May 1, 2007, Brendan Driscoll, review of Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World, p. 57.

Economist, August 16, 1997, "Paving the Way," p. 4, "Back on the Job," p. 12.

Foreign Affairs, July 1, 2007, Chester A. Crocker, "The Art of Peace: Bringing Diplomacy Back to Washington," p. 160.

International Affairs, January, 2005, Seth Jones, review of The Missing Peace, p. 250.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2004, review of The Missing Peace, p. 433; April 1, 2007, review of Statecraft.

Library Journal, July, 2004, Marcia L. Sprules, review of The Missing Peace, p. 104.

Middle East Economic Digest, May 23, 1997, "Ross Fails to Make Any Headway," p. 17; August 22, 1997, "Ross Makes Limited Impact," p. 14; March 3, 2000, "Peace Talks Founder Despite Ross Shuttle," p. 21; August 25, 2000, "Ross Moves In for Another Try at Peace Summit," p. 4; September 8, 2000, "Peace Moves Stepped Up as Deadline Wobbles," p. 2; January 26, 2001, "Dennis Ross to Tell All," p. 3.

Middle East Quarterly, fall, 2004, Gerald Steinberg, review of The Missing Peace, p. 81.

National Catholic Reporter, December 17, 2004, Margot Patterson, "Dennis Ross Speaks His Piece; Mideast Envoy Saw Region's Major Players Up Close," profile, p. 12.

National Review, August 23, 2004, David Pryce-Jones, review of The Missing Peace, p. 41.

Newsweek, January 27, 1997, Melinda Lilu and Joseph Contreras, "No More Deja Vu: A Tenacious Negotiator Cuts a Deal on Hebron," p. 94.

Newsweek International, August 16, 2004, Dan Ephron, review of The Missing Peace, p. 57; August 30, 2004, "Dennis Ross: Something Is Bubbling Up," interview, p. 60.

New York Review of Books, October 7, 2004, Robert Malley, review of The Missing Peace, p. 19.

New York Times, January 10, 2001, Joel Greenberg, "U.S. Envoy Will Try to Forge a Common Position, Israeli Says," p. A3.

New York Times Magazine, March 25, 2001, Clyde Haberman, "Dennis Ross's Exit Interview," p. 36.

New York Times Book Review, August 8, 2004, Ethan Bronner, review of The Missing Peace, p. 10; July 8, 2007, Jacob Heilbrunn, review of Statecraft, p. 14.

Policy Review, December, 2004, Victor Davis Hanson, "Process but No Peace," p. 85.

Political Science Quarterly, spring, 2005, Peter L. Hahn, review of The Missing Peace, p. 157.

Publishers Weekly, July 12, 2004, review of The Missing Peace, p. 56; July 12, 2004, Charlie Edel, "How to Make Peace … Maybe," interview, p. 57; April 16, 2007, review of Statecraft, p. 45.

Tikkun, September 1, 2007, "Talking to an Enemy," p. 8.

Time, July 24, 2000, Eric Silver, Jamil Hamad, Jay Branegan, Douglas Waller, and William Dowell, "The Man with the Plan: Camp David Is Host to the World's Highest-Stakes Poker Game. Meet the Diplomat Holding the Cards," p. 36.

U.S. News & World Report, August 21, 2000, Linda Kulman, "Life's a Vacation," p. 7; February 5, 2001, Mortimer B. Zuckerman and Terry Atlas, "A Very Difficult Period," interview, p. 32.

Washington Monthly, September, 2004, Dan Ephron, "Tired Are the Peacemakers: Tales from the Arab-Israeli Negotiating Table," p. 57.

Washington Post Book World, August 22, 2004, Glenn Frankel, review of The Missing Peace, p. 6.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October, 2001, Laila Al-Arian, "Dennis Ross Remarks Reveal U.S. Bias," p. 92; October, 2001, Robed V. Keeley, "To End the Violence," p. 9.

ONLINE

Boston Globe Online,http://www.boston.com/ (July 8, 2007), Harvey Blume, "The Professional," interview.

Mostly Fiction,http://www.mostlyfiction.com/ (November 7, 2004), Jana L. Perskie, review of The Missing Peace.

Washington Institute for Near East Policy,http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/ (January 4, 2008), author biography.