Robert Doar

Robert Doar has served as President of the American Enterprise Institute since 2019, leading the most influential center-right think tank in Washington and the institution whose foreign policy scholars, publications, and congressional testimony have provided the intellectual infrastructure for American hawkishness on Iran, support for Israeli security, and opposition to what AEI consistently characterizes as the failures of multilateral diplomatic frameworks that reward hostile actors. Born in the early 1960s, Doar earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and built his career in government administration — serving as Commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration from 2007 to 2013, where he earned a reputation as a rigorous, data-driven administrator, before joining AEI's poverty studies program and subsequently ascending to the presidency.

AEI's foreign policy output is directly relevant to Israeli security because the institution houses the analysts whose work shapes the Republican foreign policy consensus. Danielle Pletka, Frederick Kagan, Michael Rubin, and others have produced substantial scholarly and policy work on Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, and American-Israeli strategic partnership that has been directly cited in congressional testimony, executive branch deliberations, and media coverage. Under Doar's leadership, AEI has been a consistent voice opposing engagement with Iran without preconditions, supporting Israeli military operations as legitimate self-defense, and providing the analytical grounding for maximum pressure policies. The institution's annual World Forum, which convenes senior policymakers, military officials, and intellectuals, consistently treats Israeli security as a first-order American strategic interest.

Doar's personal contribution to pro-Israel advocacy is primarily institutional: he presides over the think tank that gives conservative pro-Israel foreign policy thinking its academic credibility and policy specificity. At Rank 31, Doar and AEI represent the intellectual production end of the pro-Israel coalition — the institution that takes the political commitment of elected officials and provides the research, analysis, and policy architecture that makes that commitment operationally coherent.