He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing primarily on the Middle East, Islamic militancy, counterterrorism, and intelligence.
An expert in counterterrorism and the Middle East, Gerecht was prescient in a July 2001 article for The Atlantic when he criticized the intelligence community for their collective overconfidence towards Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, reporting that U.S. officials claimed they were "picking apart" bin Laden's terrorist network "limb by limb" just a few months before the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C.[1] Gerecht has advocated the re-establishment of diplomatic relationships with Tehran before any military action is taken.
[2] According to journalist Andrew Sullivan, Gerecht also defends the use of physically coercive interrogation techniques in the ticking time bomb scenario.
He was a strong proponent of military strikes against the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan in the 1990s, a backer of both the Afghan and Iraq wars (authoring, among other pieces, the article "An Iraq War Won't Destabilize the Mideast", written in 2002 as part of pro war opinion-making that would culminate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and has repeatedly urged a hawkish approach toward Iran, including preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear sites and military retaliation for the alleged Iranian assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador in the United States.
A disciple and friend of the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, Gerecht has nevertheless argued that Islamic fundamentalists, not Muslim liberals, will be the engine of political reform and democratization in the Middle East.