Amb. Chase Untermeyer, “The Middle East Security Situation”

Chase Untermeyer is founding chairman of the Qatar-America Institute, which aims to increase understanding of the important Qatari-American relationship in security, education, and energy. From 2004 until 2007, he was United States ambassador to Qatar, on appointment of President George W. Bush.

A 1968 graduate of Harvard College with honors in government, he served during the Vietnam War as an officer in the United States Navy aboard a destroyer in the Western Pacific and as aide to the commander of US naval forces in the Philippines. Upon his return to Texas, Ambassador Untermeyer was a political reporter for the Houston Chronicle and a member of the Texas House of Representatives, elected for a district in Houston.

He left the Legislature in 1981 to go to Washington as executive assistant to then-Vice President Bush.Three years later, President Reagan appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower & Reserve Affairs. When George Bush became president in 1989, Mr Untermeyer returned to the White House as Director of Presidential Personnel and in 1991 was appointed Director of the Voice of America.

Ambassador Untermeyer is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of three volumes of diary-based memoirs of the Reagan and first Bush administrations.