Stephen Glain has been a journalist for nearly twenty five years, beginning with his first job as the transportation reporter for the Nashville Business Journal. In 1987, he packed up his grip and moved to Hong Kong, where he was hired as a business reporter for the local South China Morning Post. In 1991, he joined theWall Street Journal, which assigned him to cover South Korea. He remained as a Journal foreign correspondent for the next decade, covering Asia and the Middle East from bases in Seoul, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, and Amman.
In 2001 he took a book leave to write Dreaming of Damascus: Arab Voices in a Region of Turmoil (John Murray, UK). Its updated, US edition, published under the title Mullahs, Merchants, and Militants: The Economic Collapse of the Arab World (St. Martin’s Press), was named the best book of 2004 by online magazine The Globalist.
Glain’s latest book, State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire, was published by Crown Books in August 2011.
His articles on US foreign policy, East Asia, and the Arab world have appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Financial Times, Gourmet Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Institutional Investor, The Globalist, Survival, and ForeignPolicy.com. He has been a contributing editor and reporter for several publications, including Newsweek, the Abu Dhabi-based English-language The National, and Al Majalla.
Glain lives in Paris, France, with his wife Christina Balis and son John Atticus.
Iraqi Economy (NPR – Talk of the Nation)