Luncheon – Qatar: Crucial Peacemaker & Energy Powerhouse in a Volatile Middle East

Chase Untermeyer has held positions at all four levels of government – local, state, national, and international — over a period of more than 40 years, with work in journalism, academia, and business as well.

He was born in New Jersey but came to Houston at the age of two. He is a 1968 graduate of Harvard College with honors in government. During the Vietnam War, he served as an officer in the US Navy aboard a Pacific Fleet destroyer and as aide to the commander of US naval forces in the Philippines.

Returning to Houston, Mr. Untermeyer was a political reporter for the Houston Chronicle and executive assistant to the county judge (chief executive) of Harris County, Texas. In 1976, he was elected as a Republican to the first of two terms as a member of the Texas House of Representatives from a district on the west side of Houston.

Mr. Untermeyer resigned his seat to go to Washington in 1981 as executive assistant to then-Vice President Bush. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. During the first Bush Administration, he was assistant to the President for presidential personnel and director of the Voice of America.

From 2004 to 2007, he served as United States ambassador to the State of Qatar, on appointment of President George W. Bush. He is currently professor of practice at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston and ambassador-in-residence in the history department at Texas Tech University.

He is the author of three volumes of diary-based memoirs of the Reagan-Bush era, When Things Went Right, Inside Reagan’s Navy, and Zenith: In the White House with George HW Bush. He has also published How Important People Act: Behaving Yourself in Public.

He is married to the former Diana Cumming Kendrick of Sheridan, Wyoming, whom he met in the White House. Their daughter Ellyson, a 2016 graduate of Stanford University, works at Founders Fund.

Jim Krane, Ph.D., is the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Fellow in Middle East Energy Studies and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He specializes in energy geopolitics, with a focus on oil-exporting countries and the challenges they face from climate action, the energy transition, energy subsidies, and internal demand. He teaches classes on energy policy and geopolitics at Rice University.

Krane’s scholarly articles have been published in Nature Energy, Middle East Journal, Foreign Affairs, Energy Policy, Energy Journal, Energy Research & Social Science, Resources Policy, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, MRS Energy and Sustainability, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as well as numerous edited volumes.

He is the author of two books. His acclaimed 2009 volume “City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism” is widely recognized as the seminal work on the iconoclastic city-state, while his award-winning 2019 book “Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf” is the definitive study of energy demand in the Gulf region.

Krane spent nearly 20 years as a journalist, six of them in the Middle East. He was a longtime correspondent for the Associated Press based in Dubai, Baghdad, and New York, and has written for myriad other publications, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. He is the winner of several journalism awards, including the 2003 AP Managing Editors Deadline Reporting Award, received for his coverage of Saddam Hussein’s capture in Iraq. Krane received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, master’s from Columbia University, and bachelor’s from City College of New York.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is the Fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. His research spans the history, political and international political economy, and international relations of the Gulf States and their changing position within the global order. Coates Ulrichsen is the author of six monographs and the editor of three volumes about the Gulf States, including Insecure Gulf: The End of Certainty and the Transition to the Post-Oil Era (Hurst, 2011), The Gulf States in International Political Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and, most recently, Centers of Power in the Arab Gulf States (Hurst, 2023). Coates Ulrichsen has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, worked at the London School of Economics prior to joining the Baker Institute in 2013, and was also an Associate Fellow with the Middle East North Africa Program at Chatham House between 2012 and 2021.