Brian Hook once wrote a memo to his boss that said: “Allies should be treated differently, and better, than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies.” The boss was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and the memo answered a comment Tillerson had made about human rights.
Hook, born in 1968, went on to become the face of Washington’s Iran policy under President Trump.
From law firm to the State Department
He earned a marketing degree at the University of St. Thomas in 1990, a master’s in philosophy at Boston College and a law degree at the University of Iowa. From 1999 to 2003 he practiced corporate law at Hogan & Hartson in Washington.
Under George W. Bush he held several posts, among them Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and Special Assistant to the President for Policy in the White House Chief of Staff’s office. Afterward he founded Latitude, a Washington consulting firm. He advised the 2012 Romney campaign on foreign policy and ran foreign policy for Tim Pawlenty’s presidential bid from 2010 to 2011. In 2013 he co-founded the John Hay Initiative, an anti-isolationist group.
Tillerson appointed him director of the Office of Policy Planning in early 2017.
The Iran job
In 2018 Mike Pompeo created the Iran Action Group to run U.S. policy toward Tehran and put Hook in charge. He served as Special Representative for Iran and senior policy adviser to Pompeo from September 2018 to August 2020. Hook spent months shuttling between the United States and Europe trying to negotiate a tougher nuclear agreement with European leaders. He also negotiated the release of two Iranian-held hostages, Xiyue Wang and Michael White.
In May 2018 he flew to North Korea with Pompeo to meet Kim Jong Un and win the release of three American hostages. That September he was named as a possible replacement for national security adviser John Bolton. In February 2019 he planned a Warsaw conference on Middle East peace and security, which drew foreign ministers and diplomats from 60 countries. He also coordinated secret talks between Israel and the United Arab Emirates on sharing military and intelligence information against Iranian threats.
Not everything went smoothly. In November 2019 an internal State Department report said he had mishandled an employment complaint from department official Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who had been the target of a 2017 article in the Conservative Review that falsely claimed she was born in Iran. The report said Hook did not take proper action. Its author was later fired.
Hook announced his resignation on August 6, 2020. Elliott Abrams succeeded him. He kept working with Jared Kushner and the White House on the Abraham Accords.
After government
In 2021 Hook joined Cerberus Capital Management as vice chairman for global investments, and he teaches as an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. After Trump’s second election win, he was tapped to lead the State Department transition team and was reported to be under consideration for Secretary of State.
The relationship soured. On January 20, 2025, Trump announced on Truth Social that Hook was fired from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Two days later Trump revoked his security protection.
