Profile of Dennis Ross

Dennis Ross is a former U.S. diplomat who has served both Republican and Democratic administrations in negotiations on Middle East peace and other foreign policy issues.1 Although generally considered a political moderate, Ross has been closely associated with a number of neoconservative-led organizations and policy initiatives. A consultant for the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Ross supported the advocacy efforts of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC),2 which played a key role advocating invading Iraq in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He also frequently promotes aggressive Mideast policies in his writings and congressional testimony, and regularly teams up with scholars from organizations like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to craft policy approaches toward Tehran’s nuclear program and other issues in the region.3  

During the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, Ross was a leading architect of negotiations aimed at resolving conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Several participants in those negotiations criticized Ross for his Israel bias. In their account of the negotiations, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, Daniel Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky cite a number of anonymous officials who were critical of Ross. Said one Arab negotiator, "The perception always was that Dennis [Ross] started from the Israeli bottom line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs.… He was never looked at … as a trusted world figure or as an honest broker."4 Likewise, a former Clinton administration representative told the authors, "By the end, the Palestinians didn't fully trust Dennis. … [T]hey thought he was tilted too much towards the Israelis."5  

Ross’s role in Middle East policy came under renewed scrutiny in 2008 when it was announced that he was advising the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). WINEP was prompted to issue a press release after the New York Times identified Ross as an Obama advisor in March 2008. The press release said, “[Ross] will continue to offer advice on the substantive issues of our foreign and national security policy to the Obama campaign … on a nonexclusive basis. In accordance with our organization's policy on nonpartisanship, Ambassador Ross has not endorsed any presidential candidate.”6

Time magazine reported, “It is somewhat surprising to see Ross emerge as an official member of Obama's team…. When Ross left the State Department in 2000, he was so critical of Yasser Arafat that some friends thought he was considering working for George W. Bush, who cut ties with the late Palestinian leader.”7

Some observers pointed to the ultimate failure of the initiatives crafted by Ross as the most surprising aspect of the Obama campaign’s decision to use him as an adviser. One former Bill Clinton official told Time, "If Obama wants to embody something new that can actually succeed, it's not just a break from Bush that he's going to need, but a break from Clinton."8

From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton

Ross got his start in high-level policymaking working under Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon during the Jimmy Carter administration, where Wolfowitz headed up a project called the Limited Contingency Study, the results of which, writes author James Mann, “would play a groundbreaking role in changing American military policy toward the Persian Gulf over the coming decades.”9

The study, coauthored by Ross, was aimed at assessing potential vulnerabilities outside of Europe. Under Wolfowitz’s direction, it became the Pentagon’s “first extensive examination of the need for the United States to defend the Persian Gulf.”10 It stated, “We and our major industrialized allies have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict.” It went onto to assert that if the Soviet Union controlled the Gulf’s oil, it would “probably destroy NATO and the U.S.-Japanese alliance without recourse to war by the Soviets.” It also assessed whether countries within the region could also threaten to take control of oil fields, specifically Iraq, which the study argued had “become militarily pre-eminent in the Persian Gulf, a worrisome development because of Iraq’s radical-Arab stance, its anti-Western attitudes, its dependence of Soviet arms sales, and its willingness to foment trouble in other local nations.”11

After the election of Ronald Reagan, Wolfowitz became head of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff, where he assembled a team of advisors that included a number of figures who later became closely involved in neoconservative-led campaigns, including Ross, I. Lewis Libby, James Roche, Zalmay Khalilzad, Alan Keyes, and Francis Fukuyama. Discussing this period, Mann points to Ross in arguing that “not everyone on [Wolfowitz’s] staff was a neoconservative. … The fact remained, however, that Wolfowitz’s policy planning staff turned out to be the training ground for a new generation of national security specialists, many of whom shared Wolfowitz’s ideas, assumptions, and interests.”12

Also during the Reagan presidency, Ross “served as director of Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff … and as Deputy Director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment,” according to his biography on the website of the Harry Walker Agency,13 a speakers bureau that also promotes, among others, former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner, the neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, and alarmist antiterror wonk Steven Emerson.

During the administration of George Bush senior, Ross was appointed head of State’s Policy Planning Staff, where “he played a prominent role in U.S. policy toward the former Soviet Union, the unification of Germany and its integration into NATO, arms control negotiations, and the development of the Gulf War coalition.”14 Mann writes that Ross and Wolfowitz, who had been given a post in the Dick Cheney-led Pentagon, were two of the administration’s most vociferous proponents of using the U.S. military to defend Shiite and Kurdish rebellions after the end of the first Gulf War.15

President Bill Clinton appointed Ross as his special envoy to the Middle East. Ross’s Harry Walker bio recounts a number of successes during the period: “As the architect of the peace process, he was instrumental in assisting the Israelis and Palestinians in reaching the 1995 Interim Agreement, and he successfully brokered the Hebron Accord in 1997. He facilitated the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty and intensively worked to bring Israel and Syria together. Mr. Ross has been credited for managing the peace process through periods of crisis and stalemate.”16

But the peace process failed to produce any enduring agreements to the Palestinian situation; Ross endeavored to explain this failure in his 2004 book The Missing Peace. According to New York Times reviewer Ethan Bronner, Ross points to two explanations, “one simple and one messy but no less true or important. The simple answer is that in the end Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was the principal cause of the failure.… The second explanation, the messier one, is that neither side had taken sufficient steps to grasp the needs and neuroses of the other.”17 Although Ross considers Israeli culpability, he appears to emphasize the failures of the Arabs and Palestinians. Ross writes, “The kind of transformation that would make it possible for the Arab world to acknowledge that Israel has needs has yet to take place.” Regarding the United States, Ross writes, ''Our great failing was not in misreading Arafat. Our great failing was in not creating the earlier tests that would have either exposed Arafat's inability to ultimately make peace or forced him to prepare his people for compromise.''18

Ross’s role in the Clinton administration was later assessed by the international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their controversial 2006 paper for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, “During the Clinton Administration … Middle East policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organizations—including Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits there. These men were among President Clinton’s closest advisors at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favored creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel.”19

Ross criticized the paper, telling the New York Sun that it had a “lack of seriousness” and was “masquerading as scholarship.”20

The Post-9/11 Period

During the presidency of George W. Bush, Ross continued his policy work as a consultant to and fellow at WINEP, authoring policy papers, penning op-eds, and providing congressional testimony on Middle East issues. He repeatedly  joined forces with neoconservatives, signing open letters for PNAC, advising advocacy groups like United against Nuclear Iran (whose leadership include former CIA director James Woolsey and hawkish weapons proliferation expert Henry Sokolski),21 and joining AEI scholars Michael Rubin and Reuel Marc Gerecht in discussing Mideast policies with their counterparts at the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute,22 a think tank founded by the American Jewish Committee to serve "as an intellectual bridge between the United States and the European Union." Ross also served on the board of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, an independent think tank that promotes “the thriving of the Jewish people via professional strategic thinking and planning on issues of primary concern to world Jewry.”23

In 2006, Ross joined a cast of neoconservatives and foreign policy hawks in supporting the I. Lewis Libby Defense Fund, an initiative aimed at raising money for the disgraced former assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney who was convicted in connection to the investigation into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name. Ross served on the group’s steering committee along with Fred Thompson, Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes, Bernard Lewis, and Francis Fukuyama.24 The group’s chairman was Mel Sembler, a real estate magnate who serves as a trustee at AEI and has funded the group Freedom’s Watch.

Commenting on his reason for supporting the fund, Ross, who served with Libby under Wolfowitz in the Reagan State Department, said, “He's been a friend of mine for 25 years and I believe in him as a person and that he has a right to defend himself. It's a measure of friendship that you're there when people need you, not just when it's convenient."25

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ross supported the advocacy work of PNAC, a neoconservative-led letterhead group that advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein in response to the attacks, even if he was not tied to the them.26 Ross signed two PNAC open letters on the situation in post-war Iraq, both published in March 2003. The first of these, “Statement on Post-War Iraq,” was issued on March 19, 2003, the day before the United States began its invasion. The letter argued that Iraq should be seen as the first step in a larger reshaping of the region’s political landscape, contending that the invasion and rebuilding of Iraq could “contribute decisively to the democratization of the wider Middle East.” Other signatories included Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Thomas Donnelly, Joshua Muravchik, and several other core neoconservatives.27

Ross was just one of several so-called liberal hawks who signed the letter. Tom Barry of the International Relations Center counted six of the twenty-three signatories as representing this group: “Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton’s top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings.”28 According to Barry, this “clearly demonstrated the willingness of liberal hawks to bolster the neocons’ overarching agenda of Middle East restructuring.”29

In the aftermath of the invasion, Ross—as well as a number of  neoconservatives—expressed deep skepticism about the course of the war and the future prospects in Iraq. In 2007 congressional testimony, Ross stated: “The administration was never unified in its purpose or execution. Our assessment was faith-based not reality-based, leaving the Bush administration assuming that everything would fall into place when Saddam was removed, not fall apart. When it fell apart the administration was left without a workable strategy and it has grappled for the last four years with trying to come up with one.”30

However, in critiquing Bush’s Mideast policies, Ross has limited his criticism to issues of implementation, while giving the White House high marks for its objectives. He told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in July 2007: “The larger purpose of the Bush administration has been democratic transformation, believing that ultimately the way to defeat terrorists is to produce democratic governments to replace the oppressive and corrupt regimes that breed anger and alienation throughout much of the Muslim world. Much like in Iraq, the President’s goals are laudable and far-reaching. The problem has been that the president promoted an ambitious agenda of transformation but has presided over an administration that has consistently sought to employ only minimalist means. Trying to get by on the cheap has characterized the administration’s approach whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan or even on pushing a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”31

Ross’s approach to Iran appears to have grown increasingly belligerent over time. In 2007, he sought to preserve a role for diplomacy in U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, arguing in congressional testimony: “The Europeans, Japanese, Indians and the Arab Gulf states represent the economic lifeline to Iran. They see the use of force against Iran as worse than an Iran with nuclear weapons. If they thought their current posture of slowly ratcheting up pressures on Iran—and not cutting them off from credit guarantees, new investments, or provision of gasoline—made the use of force more and not less likely might not they change their behavior? Similarly, if the Bush administration offered to join negotiations now with Iran on the nuclear issue in return for these countries cutting the economic lifeline might not they agree to do so?”32

During the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections Ross participated in two study groups aimed at influencing the next president’s policies toward Iran, both of which proposed extremely aggressive approaches. During 2007-2008, Ross acted as the co-convenor of WINEP’s 2008 Presidential Task Force on the Future of U.S.-Israel Relations, which drafted the June 2008 report Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge. The report was signed by a number established  Democratic and Republican policy-makers, as well as by a number of leading hawks like James Woolsey, Vin Weber, and James Roche. Several advisers to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama also signed the document: Ross, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, and Richard Clarke.33

Arguing that Iran’s nuclear program "hovers above all other items on the U.S.-Israel agenda,” the WINEP study proposes that the next U.S. president, upon taking office, should immediately initiate a policy forum to discuss options on how to “compel a change in Iranian behavior on the nuclear issue.” Among the items the forum should cover are diplomatic engagement and political and economic pressure, as well as “coercive options (such as an embargo on Iran’s sale of oil or import of refined petroleum products), and preventive military action.”34

The report pleads that “Americans” try to see the Iranian situation from the Israeli perspective, arguing: "Americans should recognize that deterrence is, in Israeli eyes, an unattractive alternative to prevention, because, if deterrence fails, Israel would suffer terribly." The report also assails what is sees as the growing criticism in the United States of the U.S.-Israeli relationship (i.e. the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the “Israel Lobby”), stating, “"[The] U.S.-Israel relationship has come under unprecedented attack. Some of these critics argue that Israel has manipulated the U.S. government to act counter to the American national interest, which – if properly understood – would see Israel as a liability... We reject that critique."35

Ross also helped produce the 2008 report Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development, which was published by a study group convened by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a policy group led by several former government officials, including Sen. Daniel Coats (R-IN) and Sen. Charles Robb (D-VA). The lead drafter of the report was AEI’s Michael Rubin, an outspoken proponent of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East. Other participants included Sokolski; Michael Makovsky, a former aide to Douglas Feith in the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon; Stephen Rademaker, the husband of AEI’s Danielle Pletka who worked under John Bolton in the State Department; and Kenneth Weinstein, CEO of the Hudson Institute.36

The report argues that despite Iran’s assurances to the contrary, its nuclear program aims to develop nuclear weapons and is thus a threat to “U.S. and global security, regional stability, and the international nonproliferation regime,”37 a conclusion that stands in stark contrast to the CIA’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that Iran had put its efforts to develop nuclear warheads on hold.38 The report states, “As a new president prepares to occupy the Oval Office, the Islamic Republic’s defiance of its Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards obligations and United Nations Security Council resolutions will be among the greatest foreign policy and national security challenges confronting the nation.” In contrast to many realist assessments of the situation, the report contends that “Cold War deterrence” is not persuasive in the context of Iran’s program, due in large measure to the “Islamic Republic’s extremist ideology.” Thus, even a peaceful uranium enrichment program would place the entire Middle East region “under a cloud of ambiguity given uncertain Iranian capacities and intentions.”39

The report advises that the new U.S. president bolster the country’s military presence in the Middle East, which would include “pre-positioning additional U.S. and allied forces, deploying additional aircraft carrier battle groups and minesweepers, emplacing other war material in the region, including additional missile defense batteries, upgrading both regional facilities and allied militaries, and expanding strategic partnerships with countries such as Azerbaijan and Georgia in order to maintain operational pressure from all directions.” In addition, the new administration should suspend bilateral cooperation with Russia on nuclear issues to pressure it to stop providing assistance to Iran’s nuclear, missile, and weapons programs. And, if the new administration agrees to hold direct talks with Tehran without insisting that the country first cease enrichment activities, it should set a pre-determined compliance deadline and be prepared to apply increasingly harsh repercussions if the deadlines are not met, leading ultimately to U.S. military strikes that would “have to target not only Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but also its conventional military infrastructure in order to suppress an Iranian response.”40

Calling the report a “roadmap to war,” Jim Lobe of the Inter Press Service wrote, “In other words, if Tehran is not eventually prepared to permanently abandon its enrichment of uranium on its own soil—a position that is certain to be rejected by Iran ab initio—war becomes inevitable, and all intermediate steps, even including direct talks if the new president chooses to pursue them, will amount to going through the motions (presumably to gather international support for when push comes to shove).… What is a top Obama adviser [Dennis Ross] doing signing on to it?”41

In 2007, Ross published Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), described by Publisher’s Weekly as an “avowedly ‘neo-liberal’ rebuke of Bush's unilateralist, ‘faith-based’ foreign policy blundering. Indeed, with its call for virtuoso state craftsmanship and its detailed proposals on everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Iranian nuclear ambitions to relations with China, it could well be Ross's application for the 2009 secretary of state opening.”42

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