Office Address:
Naval Postgraduate School
Department of National Security Affairs
333 Glasgow Hall
1411 Cunningham Road
Monterey, CA 93943

ZACHARY SHORE is Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies University of California, Berkeley. He spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Before moving to California, Shore earned his doctorate in modern history at Oxford, performed postdoctoral research at Harvard, and served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.

Shore is a historian of twentieth-century international conflict whose research focuses on foreign policy decision making. His work explores the question: why do people shoot themselves in the foot? This conundrum has driven each of his past three books. In his first work, What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2003), he showed how Hitler's power to make informed decisions was limited by the frenetic system that Hitler himself created. Shore's second book, Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), asked why the United States and Europe were alienating the moderate Muslim populations they most wanted to attract. His third book, Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions (Bloomsbury, 2008), examined the most common cognition traps that ensnare statesmen on matters of war and peace. Shore is currently researching how statesmen learn to think like their enemies.