David Adesnik

Dr. David Adesnik is the vice president of research at FDD, where he is responsible for the oversight of FDD publications and the supervision of FDD’s researchers. His own research focuses on the conflict between Israel and the Iranian-led network of terror groups and militias that includes Hamas and Hezbollah. Previously, David served as policy director at the Foreign Policy Initiative and was a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. For two years, he served as deputy director for Joint Data Support at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he focused on the modeling and simulation of irregular warfare and counterinsurgency. He also spent several years as a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. In that capacity, he spent four months in Baghdad as an operations research and systems analyst for Multinational Corps – Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2008, he was part of the foreign policy and national security staff for John McCain’s presidential campaign.

David has received fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Harvard University, and the University of Virginia. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Dispatch, National Review, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News. David holds a PhD and an M.A. in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His dissertation focused on the Reagan administration’s approach to democracy promotion. He received his B.A. in history from Yale University, from which he graduated summa cum laude.