Suzanne DiMaggio

Suzanne DiMaggio is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East and Asia. She is one of the foremost experts and practitioners of diplomatic dialogues with countries that have limited or no official relations with the United States, especially Iran and North Korea. For over two decades, she has led Track 1.5 and Track 2 conversations to help policymakers identify pathways for diplomatic progress on a range of issues, including regional security, nuclear nonproliferation, conflict prevention and resolution, crisis management, confidence building and negotiation, and bilateral relations. Her research and work draw on an approach to unofficial engagement she has been developing since the late 1990s, which began with a focus on U.S. relations with China, Russia, and Japan, and later expanded to Iran, Myanmar/Burma, and North Korea.

She directs Carnegie’s U.S.-Iran Initiative, which is carried out through a combination of policy dialogue and scholarly research with the aim of exploring possible grounds for constructive diplomatic engagement and the development of mutually acceptable strategies for managing a range of contentious issues. The initiative’s centerpiece is a long-running dialogue that she launched in 2002, which is often cited as a model for how to conduct informal diplomacy effectively and creatively. These efforts helped to establish a foundational basis for the secret talks between Iran and the Obama administration that led to the 2015 landmark comprehensive nuclear agreement. They also contributed to a de-escalation in tensions following the killing by the U.S. of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iranian retaliatory strikes on Al Asad Airbase in Iraq in January 2020.

Her work on North Korea included an unofficial Track 1.5 dialogue process that transitioned to the first official diplomatic discussions between the Trump administration and North Korean government in 2017. In 2011, she facilitated talks that brought together senior officials from Myanmar and the U.S. to exchange views on the re-establishment of relations following the transition of the Myanmar’s government.

Before joining Carnegie, DiMaggio was a senior fellow at New America (2014-2018), where she directed several high-level policy dialogues, including with Iran, North Korea, and China. Prior to that, she was the vice president of global policy programs at the Asia Society (2007-2014), where she set the strategic direction for moving the Society’s work in the policy arena from a public program-focused forum to a global think tank aimed at addressing the most critical challenges facing the United States and Asia. As the vice president of policy programs at the United Nations Association of the USA (1998-2007), she directed programs that advanced multilateral approaches to transnational challenges and advocated in support of principled U.S. international engagement. She also served as a member of the Secretariat responsible for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s contribution to the Dialogue among Civilizations. Before joining UNA-USA, she was a program officer at the United Nations University (1993-1998), a research institute that links the UN system with international academic and policy communities. First based in Tokyo, Japan, and later at UN headquarters in New York, her work at UNU focused on international security and development issues. From 2000-2007, she was an adjunct professor at the School of Diplomacy & International Relations at Seton Hall University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the United Nations, multilateral diplomacy, and sustainable development.

DiMaggio is a director at the Iran Project, an advisory board member of Foreign Policy for America, the Vienna-based Open Nuclear Network, and the National Committee on North Korea, and a co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where she served as the inaugural board chair. She holds a BA from New York University and an MA from City College of New York (CUNY). She is a frequent commentator in the news media and her writings have appeared in national and international press outlets. She resides in NYC’s Greenwich Village with her husband, jazz bassist and composer Ben Allison, and daughter.