Daniel Benaim was a fellow at The Century Foundation. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and part-time faculty in the Program in International Relations at New York University (NYU). Benaim works on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Previously, he served as Middle East policy adviser and foreign policy speechwriter at the White House, the Department of State, and the U.S. Senate. He was also an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Until June 2015, Benaim was foreign policy speechwriter and Middle East adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden, traveling with the vice president to twenty-five countries. Before that, he wrote speeches for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Deputy Secretaries Bill Burns and Tom Nides and served as a member of Secretary Clinton’s policy planning staff covering Egypt. Benaim also has been a professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chief speechwriter to former Senator John Kerry (D-MA), and a detailee to the National Security Council staff.
Benaim has designed and taught courses at NYU, including on diplomatic speechwriting, the U.S. response to the 2011 Arab Revolutions, and contemporary issues in U.S. foreign policy. As a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, he has conducted extensive field research and published reports and long-format writings on U.S. policies toward Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, and Arab-African ties, and testified before Congress on Trump’s Middle East policies.
Benaim’s writings have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic. He received his MA in law and diplomacy from The Fletcher School and his BA in English literature from Yale University. He was a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
