He is a former adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a Senior Fellow to the Future of Diplomacy Program from 2017 to 2022.

Ignatius was awarded a Frank Knox Fellowship from Harvard University and studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he received a diploma in economics.

[8] After completing his education, Ignatius was an editor at the Washington Monthly before moving to The Wall Street Journal, where he spent ten years as a reporter.

[citation needed] In writing his column, Ignatius has travelled to the Middle East and interviewed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Lebanese military organization Hezbollah.

Melvin A. Goodman, a 42-year CIA veteran, Johns Hopkins professor, and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, has called Ignatius "the mainstream media's apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency," citing as examples Ignatius's criticism of the Obama administration for investigating the CIA's role in the use of torture in interrogations during the Iraq War and his charitable defense of the agency's motivations for outsourcing such activities to private contractors.

[16][17][18][19] In addition to being a journalist, Ignatius has written eleven novels in the suspense/espionage fiction genre that draw on his experience and interest in foreign affairs and his knowledge of intelligence operations.

[citation needed] In May 2015, MSNBC's Morning Joe announced that Ignatius would be teaming up with composer Mohammed Fairouz to create a political opera titled The New Prince, based on the teachings of Niccolò Machiavelli.

And then the final chapter is basically the story of Dick Cheney [and] bin Laden, the way in which those two ideas of what we're obliged to do as leaders converged in such a destructive way.

"[24] In 2006, Ignatius wrote a foreword to the American edition of Moazzam Begg's Enemy Combatant, a book about the author's experiences as a detainee at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

[citation needed] In 2011 Ignatius held a contest for The Washington Post readers to write a spy novel.

Over eight weeks, readers sent in their versions of what befalls CIA agents Alex Kassem and Sarah Mancini and voted for their favorite entries.

[26] In early 2012 Ignatius served as an adjunct lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, teaching an international affairs course titled Understanding the Arab Spring from the Ground Up: Events in the Middle East, their Roots and Consequences for the United States.

[33] On March 26, 2014, Ignatius wrote a piece in The Washington Post on the then-crisis in Ukraine and how the world would deal with Putin's actions.

His piece mentioned four-star USAF general Philip M. Breedlove, the current NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Deshchytsya.

[34][non-primary source needed] At the 2009 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Ignatius moderated a discussion including Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israeli president Shimon Peres, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, and Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa.

[35] Erdoğan objected to Peres's tone and raised his voice during the Israeli president's impassioned defense of his nation's actions.

[...] Because the Israel–Palestinian conflict provokes such heated emotions on both sides of the debate," Ignatius concluded, "it was impossible for anyone to be seen as an impartial mediator."

Ignatius wrote that his experience elucidated a larger truth about failure of the United States' attempt to serve as an impartial mediator in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.