Elizabeth Dent is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where she focuses on U.S. foreign and defense policy toward the Gulf states, Iraq, and Syria. She was previously the director for the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, managing the day-to-day U.S. defense relationship with Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Her other roles at the U.S. Department of Defense included serving as the special advisor to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, where she primarily worked on the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as serving as the Pentagon lead for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. 

Dent was previously a non-resident scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Countering Terrorism and Extremism Program and a consultant with NTT Data. Prior to that, she served as the special assistant to the special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, supporting diplomatic engagements with coalition countries and working with local partners on the ground in Iraq and Syria to accelerate the campaign against the Islamic State group. She began her work on ISIS and extremist organizations at the Department of State in 2014, where she helped coordinate and implement the counter-ISIS messaging strategy and later covered ISIS in North Africa for the coalition office. She began her career at the Department of State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, where she provided policy guidance and support to bureau leadership regarding best security, strategic, and operational practices.