Ambassador Martin S. Indyk AM is Distinguished Fellow and Director of executive education at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he was the John C. Whitehead Distinguished Fellow in International Diplomacy in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From February 2015 to March 2018, he served as Executive Vice President of Brookings. Ambassador Indyk served as the US special envoy for the Israeli–Palestinian negotiations from July 2013 to June 2014. Prior to this, he was Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy program and a Senior Fellow and the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

He served as US Ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2001. He also served as Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council (1993–95) and as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs in the US Department of State (1997–2000).

Before entering government, he was founding Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy for eight years. He serves on the boards of the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia, the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, and the Aspen Institute’s Middle East Investment Initiative. Ambassador Indyk also serves as a member of the advisory boards of the Israel Democracy Institute and America Abroad Media.

Ambassador Indyk is the author of Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (A.A. Knopf, 2021) and Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (Simon and Schuster, 2009). He is co-author of Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy with Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Lieberthal (Brookings Institution Press, 2012).

He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Sydney and a doctorate in international relations from the Australian National University.