Fouad A. Ajami (Arabic: فؤاد عجمي; September 18, 1945 – June 22, 2014) was a Lebanese-born American professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues.

[11] Subsequently, Ajami has written several other books: The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey (1998), Beirut: City of Regrets (1988), and The Vanished Imam: Musa Al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon (1986).

[14] One notable contribution Ajami made in the September October 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs was a rebuttal to Samuel Huntington’s "The Clash of Civilizations?

According to Judith Miller, Ajami continued to argue that militant Islamism of the type represented by Al Qaeda had peaked and was fading into insignificance.

He further claims that the pre-eminence of a so-called "kin-country" syndrome will provide a civilizational rallying point that will replace political ideology and traditional "balance of power" considerations for relations between states and nations, resulting in a division between the West and "the rest" creating a backlash against Western values (which supposedly "differ fundamentally" from those prevalent in other civilizations).

He also argues that civilizational ties are only utilized by states and groups when it is in their best interest to do so and that modernity and secularism are here to stay, especially in places with considerable struggles to obtain them, and he cites the example of the Indian middle class.

"[16] Ajami was an outspoken supporter of the Iraq War, which he believed “issued out of a deep American frustration... with the culture of terrorism that had put down roots in Arab lands.

"[17] In an August 2002 speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, US Vice President Dick Cheney sought to assuage concerns about the anticipated US invasion of Iraq, stating: "As for the reaction of the Arab 'street,' the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are 'sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.

An American expedition in the wake of thwarted UN inspections would be seen by the vast majority of Arabs as an imperial reach into their world, a favor to Israel, or a way for the United States to secure control over Iraq's oil.

[19]But he also goes on to say: America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world – the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds.

Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects.Ajami retained a positive view of the war three years later.

[20] Vice President Cheney cited Ajami again in an October 21, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stating, "We have no illusions about the road ahead.

[24]In June 2011, Ajami wrote an article for The New Republic arguing that the U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, writing that "the United States will have to be prepared for and accept the losses and adversity that are an integral part of staying on, rightly, in so tangled and difficult a setting.