Tom Duffy
Tom Duffy is a retired American diplomat and naval officer with nearly 40 years of experience in global statecraft and maritime strategy. During the Tanker War, he served in the Persian Gulf aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Cochrane (DDG-21), later working as a strategist within the U.S. Navy’s Strategic Concepts Group in the Pentagon.
Following his military service, he spent over three decades in the U.S. Foreign Service, where his prominent assignments included serving as the first State Department Foreign Policy Advisor (POLAD) to the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and working extensively on UN affairs at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, directing the Office of UN Security Council affairs at the State Department, and acting US Permanent Representative to the UN food security agencies in Rome, Italy.
He is the author of the book book “Tanker War in the Gulf: Operation Earnest Will, Diplomacy and Seapower in Practice“.
In his landmark book, Tanker War in the Gulf: Operation Earnest Will, Diplomacy and Seapower in Practice, naval historian Tom Duffy explores how the United States and its international partners successfully navigated the volatile maritime escalation of 1987–1988. Decades later, as Western coalitions…