On the Issues Episode 86: David Ottaway

Today’s guest is David Ottaway, Middle East Fellow at the Wilson Center. He received a BA from Harvard, magna cum laude, in 1962 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1972. He worked 35 years for The Washington Post as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe and later as a national security and investigative reporter in Washington before retiring in 2006. He has won numerous awards for his reporting at home and abroad and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ottaway was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 1979-80 and again in 2005-06 and is currently a Middle East Fellow. He just released a book about contemporary Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman: The Icarus of Saudi Arabia? His book before that, co-authored with his wife, Marina, is A Tale of four Worlds: the Arab Region After the Uprising, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

In today’s episode, we discuss the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel, both countries’ concerns over Iran, US interests in the Gulf, and evolving US-Saudi relations.