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Thursday, April 2, 2026 at Noon
Santa Rosa Country Club

with Daniel E. Zoughbie, 
Complex Systems Scientist and Historian

Professor Zoughbie's sponsor is Linda Lambert,
WACSC Program Committee

About the Program         

          The Middle East today is a tinderbox of fragile states, militant movements, nuclear tensions, and mass displacement. Daniel Zoughbie’s gripping talk, based on his latest book, Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East from Truman to Trump (Simon & Schuster 2025), will take us through the decisions of twelve American Presidents and examine how they paved the way to war and instability in the Middle East.  The talk will also examine the one president who chose a different way.

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          Daniel E. Zoughbie, PhD, is a complex-systems scientist, historian, and one of today’s most thoughtful voices on presidential decision-making and U.S. foreign policy. He serves as Associate Project Scientist at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also leads the Middle East and North Africa Diplomacy, Development, and Defense Initiative.

          Daniel E.  Zoughbie is a complex-systems scientist, a historian, and an expert on presidential decision-making.  He is an associate project scientist at the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, a faculty affiliated at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge.  He is also principal investigator of the Middle East and North African Diplomacy, Development, and Defense Initiative and the author of Indecision Points; George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (MIT Press, 2014).  His award-winning research has been published in journals such as PLOS Medicine, PLOS Complex Systems, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, JAIDS, and Social Science and Medicine.   Zoughbie has been appointed to positions at Georgetown University, Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Bologna, University College Dublin, University of Athens, and Campus Bio Medico University of Rome.  Zoughbie graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley.  He studied at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship and completed his doctorate, also at Oxford, as a Weidenfeld Scholar. 

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