Arab Strategy Forum

It is managed by the Ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

[1] It stated aim is to be a platform for public and private sector leaders to develop future strategies.Launched in 2004, originally as a biennial three-day event[2] titled the Dubai Strategy Forum, the Forum was conceived to promote debate on policy in the Arab world.

[6] In 2016, addressing the forum, Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and former US Secretary of Defence, together with former British Prime Minister David Cameron, jointly called for a regional alliance against terrorism.

Panetta asserted such a coalition “could be a powerful signal to Iran that it can’t go into countries as it did in Yemen and Syria.”[7] The forum has often hosted contradictory views.

[9] In 2018 both former French President Francois Hollande and former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the Forum as a platform to roundly condemn the US decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem.