Launched in 2004, originally as a biennial three-day event[2] titled the Dubai Strategy Forum, the Forum was conceived to promote debate on policy in the Arab world.[3] It was renamed the Arab Strategy Forum in 2006. The keynote address at the inaugural forum was given by former US President Bill Clinton.[4] It was relaunched in 2009 under the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation.[5]
In 2015 it published a report costing the Arab Spring at $833.7 billion (attributing this to losses in GDP, drops in tourism; stock and financial market losses and drops in Foreign Direct Investment).[6] In 2016, addressing the forum, Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and former US Secretary of Defence, together with former British Prime Minister David Cameron, jointly called for a regional alliance against terrorism. Panetta asserted such a coalition “could be a powerful signal to Iran that it can’t go into countries as it did in Yemen and Syria.”[7]
The forum has often hosted contradictory views. In 2015 former British Foreign Secretary William Hague pointed to the growing threat of Daesh,[8] while in 2014 Francis Fukuyama claimed the threat posed by the group had been overblown by media and the US.[9] In 2018 both former French President Francois Hollande and former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the Forum as a platform to roundly condemn the US decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem.[10]
