Ryan Crocker is a member of the Afghanistan War Commission, established by Congress to examine the key decisions made over two decades of engagement in Afghanistan and to develop recommendations and lessons learned. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and holds the Distinguished Chair in Diplomacy and Security at RAND. Previous academic appointments have included Diplomat in Residence at Princeton University, inaugural Kissinger Fellow at Yale University, the James Schlesinger Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia, and Texas A&M where he was Dean of the Bush School of Government.
He was a career Foreign Service Officer who served six times as an American Ambassador: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon. He serves on the Board of Advisors of No One Left Behind, an NGO dedicated to ensuring that America keeps its promises to Afghans and Iraqis who risked their lives to support us. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2009.
Other recent awards include the West Point Association of Graduates Thayer Award in 2020 and the inaugural Bancroft Award, presented by the Naval Academy in 2016. Also in 2016, he was named an Honorary Fellow of the Literary and Historical Society at University College, Dublin where he was presented the annual James Joyce Award. He is an Honorary Marine.
A year after Assad’s fall, Syria faces a pivotal moment. Washington must lead.
One year after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria is still in very fragile phase of its transition to a new political order. The country faces monumental reconstruction challenges, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, well beyond the capabilities of the new Syrian government. Without sustained American leadership and investment, Syria’s transition will be slow, fragile, and dangerously reversible.
American commitment to foundational values must withstand assault by an individual
Two members of the US diplomatic corps who served in Afghanistan and are involved in the Afghan resettlement program call on Americans to uphold principles of justice and fairness when judging the person accused of shooting National Guard members in Washington, DC.
Ambassador Ryan Crocker reports on his visit to Lebanon and Syria on October 12-17 as part of a small delegation organized by the Washington office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
