William McCants is a fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and director of its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University and has held government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism. From 2009-2011, McCants served as a U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He has also held positions as program manager of the Minerva Initiative for the Department of Defense; an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses and SAIC; and a fellow at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.