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When President Donald Trump arrives in the Oval Office, he will face a challenge that has long been familiar to the American chief executives, diplomats and the nation: What do we do about the Middle East? The multi-faceted Middle East issues include peace between neighbors, international economic treaties and coping with a form of terrorism that ignores national borders. All of these challenges and more in the Middle East have been shown to need the deft hand of experienced diplomats. As a new president prepares for his term in Washington, Career Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering will call on his decades of frontline diplomatic experience to address the Middle East challenges at a Council program on Wednesday, December 7, at SMU. Ambassador Pickering, whose career includes service in the Middle East as U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Ambassador to Jordan, will discuss "U.S. Policy for the for the Next American Administration in the Middle East. The ambassador knows diplomacy in many languages. His U.S. Department of State biography notes that he "speaks French, Spanish and Swahili fluently and also Arabic, Hebrew and Russian." As his impressive State biography notes, Ambassador Pickering's career includes service as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (1997-2000) and as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria and Jordan. He also served as the U.S. Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations in New York (1989-1992). There, he led U.S. efforts to create a U.N. Security Council coalition during and after the first Gulf War. Other State Department positions took him to Tanzania, Geneva and Washington where his responsibilities included serving as Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Oceans, Environmental and Scientific Affairs and as Special Assistant to Secretaries of State William P. Rogers and Henry A. Kissinger. He retired from the State Department in 2000 and joined The Boeing Company as Senior Vice President, International Relations and member of the Executive Council and is a member of the board for a number of not-for-profit organizations. He holds degrees from Bowdoin College, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the University of Melbourne. The State Department's Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship is described as "named in honor of one of the most distinguished and capable American diplomats of the latter half of the 20th century." One of Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering's most insightful comments may make you smile: "In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known."