Non-Resident Fellow, AGSIW
Hisham Melhem is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Melhem has interviewed many American and international public figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, among others. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. For four years he hosted “Across the Ocean,” a weekly current affairs program on U.S.-Arab relations for Al Arabiya.
Before he headed to the Middle East on his five-country journey, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was preparing himself for an unpleasant encounter with an angry Turkish president, a sullen Egyptian president, and a tight-fisted international community gathered in Kuwait clearly reluctant to commit billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq.
